Restzeichen

Restzeichen (literally “remainder signs”) is a German term used in several technical fields to refer to signs, characters, or marks that stand for the remainder of a sequence, a field, or a portion of data after the main content has been processed.

In typography and data entry, Restzeichen may denote placeholder characters used to fill a fixed-width field or to indicate that the rest of the content is omitted in a given edition or display. Common examples are space characters or other padding glyphs. In computing and data formats, Restzeichen can describe padding bytes or terminators that delineate the end of a value, a record, or a block.

In linguistics and transcription, the term may be used informally to refer to signs that indicate residual material in a transcript, such as untranscribed segments, though this usage is not standardized.

Because Restzeichen is not a standardized term, its exact meaning depends on the source. Readers should check field-specific definitions when encountering it.

See also: Auslassungszeichen, Padding, Nullterminator, Padding character, Whitespace.