What does ord mean?

[Vic Norton]

I am confused. I can't figure out what ord does. For example I've  
pasted the NO-BREAK-SPACE (00A0) between the quotation marks in the  
ord of the following line.
   print ord(" "), "\n";
When I run this line in a Perl script I get
   194
What does this 194 mean? As far as I know A0 = 10x16 = 160. And 194  
certainly can't be an octal numeral.

Regards,

Vic