Acronym for the American National Standards Institute. The term “ANSI” as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference, but is nowadays a misnomer that continues to persist in the Windows community. The source of this comes from the fact that the Windows code page 1252 was originally based on an ANSI draft—which became International organisation for standardisation (ISO) Standard 8859-1. “ANSI applications” are usually a reference to non-Unicode or code page–based applications.