Historically, the term "character" was also used to just denote a specific number of contiguous bits. While a character is most commonly assumed to refer to 8 bits (one byte) today, other definitions, like 6-bit character code was once popular (using only upper case, while enough bits to also represent lower case, not with numbers and punctuation allowed for), and even 5-bit Baudot code have been used in the past as well, and while the term has also been applied to 4 bits with only 16 possible values, it wasn't meant to, nor can, represent the full English alphabet. See also Universal Character Set characters, where 8 bits are not enough to represent, while all can be represented with one or more 8-bit code units with UTF-8.