What is m ary encoding?

M-ary encoding is the process of encoding the 'q' source symbol output alphabets into 'k' symbol code (k>q) such that each k code-Word is of length M.

E.g: If a source emits 4 symbols A B C D and if we use 2-ary(binary- with two alphabets 0 & 1) encoding, the code-Words can be:

1. A-00
2. B-01
3. C-10
4. D-11 OR ANY OTHER COMBINATIONS DEPENDING ON THE ENCODING SCHEME