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The ISO 8859 series is a collection of 16-bit character encodings, also known as code pages, defined by the International Organization for Standardization. Each part of the ISO 8859 series is a superset of the ASCII character set and defines characters for specific European languages. They are designed to handle characters that are not present in the 7-bit ASCII standard.

ISO 8859-1, often referred to as Latin-1, is the most widely known and used part. It covers the languages of Western Europe, including English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, among others. It includes accented characters, currency symbols, and other common European characters.

Other parts of the ISO 8859 series were developed to support different language groups. For example, ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) is for Central and Eastern European languages, ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic) for Cyrillic alphabets, and ISO 8859-7 (Greek) for the Greek alphabet. Each part uses the first 128 code points identically to ASCII, with the remaining 128 code points allocated for language-specific characters.

While the ISO 8859 series was significant in its time, its limitations in supporting a wide range of languages and symbols led to the development and widespread adoption of Unicode (specifically UTF-8), which can represent characters from virtually all writing systems. However, ISO 8859 parts are still encountered in legacy systems and some specific applications.