What does 'JSON' stand for?

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation.

JSON is a lightweight text format for representing structured data. It organizes information with objects made of name-value pairs and arrays containing ordered values. A user record, for example, might contain a name, an account number, and a list of preferences. Because JSON is plain text, it can be transmitted between a browser, a server, and many different programming languages.

Despite its name, JSON is not limited to JavaScript. Most modern languages provide tools for parsing JSON text into native data structures and generating JSON from them. Its values can be strings, numbers, booleans, null, objects, or arrays, but JSON does not support every data type found in programming languages, such as functions.

JSON became popular through web development and is now common in APIs, configuration files, and data exchange. A common mistake is expanding the acronym as “Java Source Object Notation,” “JavaScript Oriented Notation,” or “Java Standard Object Notation.” The correct word is “Object,” and JSON is unrelated to the Java programming language.