or that the term identifies a single unambiguous encoding, neither of which is the case.

The ISO standard ISO 8859 was the first international standard to formalise a (limited) expansion of the ASCII character set: of the many language variants it encoded, ISO 8859-1 ("ISO Latin 1")which supports most Western European languages is best known in the West. There are many other extended ASCII encodings (more than 220 DOS and Windows codepages).