Double-byte character set (DBCS) support lets you process characters in languages that contain too many characters or symbols for each to be assigned a 1-byte hexadecimal value. You can use DBCS to process languages, such as Japanese and Chinese, that use ideographic characters. In DBCS, two bytes are used to describe each character; this lets you describe more than 35 000 characters. When one byte is used to describe a character, as in EBCDIC, it is called a single-byte character set (SBCS).