Write it by hand
- Write your name and decide which letters are capitals. A capital letter and a small letter have different codes.
- Look up each letter in the binary alphabet. A is 01000001 and a is 01100001.
- Write the bytes in the same order as the letters, with a space between bytes.
- For a first and last name, put 00100000 between them. That byte is the space character.[1]
Worked example: Ada
- Name
- Ada
- Binary
- 01000001 01100100 01100001
| Character | Code point | Bytes in binary |
|---|---|---|
| A | U+0041 | 01000001 |
| d | U+0064 | 01100100 |
| a | U+0061 | 01100001 |
- Capital A is 65 and small a is 97, so the name uses two different bytes for the same letter.
- Three letters give three bytes, which is 24 bits.
Names in binary
| Name | Binary |
|---|---|
| Sam | 01010011 01100001 01101101 |
| Maria | 01001101 01100001 01110010 01101001 01100001 |
| Leo | 01001100 01100101 01101111 |
| Noah | 01001110 01101111 01100001 01101000 |
| Mia | 01001101 01101001 01100001 |
Every name in this table uses only English letters, so each letter is exactly one byte and the binary has eight digits per letter.[2]
Names with accents
Names such as José, Zoë or Søren have letters outside ASCII. In UTF-8 each of those letters takes two bytes, so the binary is longer than the name. The converter handles this for you.[2][3]
- Name
- José
- Binary
- 01001010 01101111 01110011 11000011 10101001
| Character | Code point | Bytes | Binary |
|---|---|---|---|
| J | U+004A | 1 | 01001010 |
| o | U+006F | 1 | 01101111 |
| s | U+0073 | 1 | 01110011 |
| é | U+00E9 | 2 | 11000011 10101001 |
- J, o and s are one byte each. The é takes two, so four letters make five bytes.
Ways people use their name in binary
- Bracelets and beads
- Two colors of beads stand for 0 and 1, with eight beads for each letter.
- Cross-stitch and knitting
- A row of light and dark squares for each byte makes a simple pattern.
- Cards and notes
- A short name in binary makes a small puzzle for a friend to decode with the binary to text converter.
Questions about names in binary
Should I include the space between my first and last name?
Yes, if you want the binary to decode back to the full name with a space. Leave it out if you only want the letters.
Does a capital letter change the binary?
Yes. A capital and a small letter differ in one bit, so Ada and ada give different bytes for the first letter.
Sources, last checked October 12, 2026
- Glossary of Unicode Terms (Unicode Consortium)
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a 7-bit coded character set for information interchange.
- RFC 3629: UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646 (IETF, 2003)
US-ASCII characters are encoded in one octet having the normal US-ASCII value, and any octet with such a value can only stand for a US-ASCII character, and nothing else.
In UTF-8, characters from the U+0000..U+10FFFF range (the UTF-16 accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets.