ISO 2022, more formally ISO/IEC 2022, is an ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard specifying a technique for including multiple character sets in a single character encoding. Unlike ISO 8859 character encodings, which use 8 bits for every character, the ISO 2022 encodings are variable size encodings typically using either 8 or 16 bits per character. Several character encodings use ISO 2022 mechanisms. For example, ISO-2022-JP is a widely used character encoding for the Japanese language.