[1] It is named after the city of Cork in Ireland, where during a TeX Users Group (TUG) conference in 1990 a new encoding was introduced for LaTeX.
[1] It contains 256 characters supporting most west- and east-European languages with the Latin alphabet.
In modern engines such as XeTeX and LuaTeX Unicode is fully supported and the 8-bit font encodings are obsolete.
The encoding supports most European languages written in Latin alphabet.
Notable exceptions are: Languages with slightly suboptimal support include: