diff --git a/glossary/Character-encoding.md b/glossary/Character-encoding.md
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..346b59c7b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/glossary/Character-encoding.md
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+### Character encoding
+
+A character encoding defines a mapping between bytes and text, specifying how the sequenece of bytes should be interpreted.
+Two commonly used character encodings are ASCII and UTF-8.
diff --git a/glossary/UTF-8.md b/glossary/UTF-8.md
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..faba6cecd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/glossary/UTF-8.md
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+### UTF-8
+
+UTF-8 stands for UCS Transformation Format 8 and is a commonly used character encoding.
+UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII and can represent and standard Unicode character.