It is the International Standards Organization (ISO) that defines the standard character-sets for different alphabets/languages.
| Character set | Description | Covers |
| ISO-8859-1 | Latin alphabet part 1 | North America, Western Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, Africa |
| ISO-8859-2 | Latin alphabet part 2 | Eastern Europe |
| ISO-8859-3 | Latin alphabet part 3 | SE Europe, Esperanto, miscellaneous others |
| ISO-8859-4 | Latin alphabet part 4 | Scandinavia/Baltics (and others not in ISO-8859-1) |
| ISO-8859-5 | Latin/Cyrillic part 5 | The languages that are using a Cyrillic alphabet such as Bulgarian, Belarusian, Russian and Macedonian |
| ISO-8859-6 | Latin/Arabic part 6 | The languages that are using the Arabic alphabet |
| ISO-8859-7 | Latin/Greek part 7 | The modern Greek language as well as mathematical symbols derived from the Greek |
| ISO-8859-8 | Latin/Hebrew part 8 | The languages that are using the Hebrew alphabet |
| ISO-8859-9 | Latin 5 part 9 | The Turkish language. Same as ISO-8859-1 except Turkish characters replace Icelandic ones |
| ISO-8859-10 | Latin 6 Lappish, Nordic, Eskimo | The Nordic languages |
| ISO-8859-15 | Latin 9 (aka Latin 0) | Similar to ISO 8859-1 but replaces some less common symbols with the euro sign and some other missing characters |
| ISO-2022-JP | Latin/Japanese part 1 | The Japanese language |
| ISO-2022-JP-2 | Latin/Japanese part 2 | The Japanese language |
| ISO-2022-KR | Latin/Korean part 1 | The Korean language |