What Does 01101101 Mean? Reading Single-Byte Binary Codes
If you've landed here searching a specific string like 01101101 or 01101111, you've probably found a single 8-bit binary code somewhere — a puzzle, an easter egg, a piece of code — and you want to know what letter it represents. The short version: an 8-bit binary code like this one maps to a single ASCII character, and you can decode it by hand once you know the trick.
Here's how the conversion actually works, and what a few of the most commonly-searched codes decode to.
How to read an 8-bit binary code by hand
Each of the 8 digits (bits) represents a power of 2, read left to right: 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. Add up the values where the digit is a 1, and ignore the positions where it's a 0. That sum is the character's position in the ASCII table (0-127 covers every standard English letter, digit, and basic punctuation mark).
Take 01101101: the 1s sit in the 64, 32, 8, 4, and 1 positions. 64 + 32 + 8 + 4 + 1 = 109. Look up 109 in the ASCII table and you get lowercase 'm'. That's the entire method — convert the 8-bit binary string to its decimal value, then match that number to the ASCII table.
A few commonly-searched codes decoded
01101101 → m (109). 01101100 → l (108). 01101111 → o (111). 01101000 → h (104). 01100101 → e (101). These frequently show up as isolated searches because they're individual letters pulled from a longer binary message — someone decoding 'hello' or a similar word one character at a time, rather than running the whole string through a translator at once.
Decode a whole message instead of one letter at a time
Decoding one 8-bit group by hand is manageable; a full sentence in binary is tedious and error-prone to do manually. Our Binary Code tool converts any length of binary back to readable text (and text to binary) instantly, UTF-8 aware, so it handles full messages, not just single bytes. Runs entirely in your browser.