CHAR (character) types are suitable for storing a single letter each. The original CHAR uses codes from the ancient ASCII character mapping table. This table contains a mix of 255 different characters (letters, numbers, control characters, graphic symbols). Its advantage is that it requires only 1 byte, but its disadvantage is that the character set is quite limited; for example, Hungarian or Chinese accented characters are mostly excluded.

The extended version of CHAR is WCHAR (wide-character), which has a 2-byte length but can be used more broadly with its (UNICODE) UCS-2 mapping. Up to 65,535 character mappings can be encoded with 16 bits; this range is not fully utilized by UNICODE.