As a matter of fact there was a question of a day not too long ago asking why nvarchar is named as it is. The answer to the question was nvarchar stands for National Character Varying even though the order of the words does not really match. This mismatch is still much better than infamous varchar2 in the O universe where they originally had a type named varchar which implementation was probably so messed up that the O-people came up with a "brilliant" idea to develop another type and creatively name it varchar2 while leaving outdated varchar still available :hehe:

Oleg