title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The top contender in the 2001 season was the Los Angeles Sparks. Led by Lisa Leslie, the Sparks posted a regular-season record of 28–4. They advanced to their first ever WNBA Finals and swept the Charlotte Sting.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Looking to repeat in 2002, the Sparks again made a strong run toward the postseason, going 25–7 in the regular season under head coach Michael Cooper, formerly of the Los Angeles Lakers. Again, Leslie dominated opponents throughout the Playoffs, leading the Sparks to a perfect 6–0 record through all three rounds, beating the New York Liberty in the 2002 Finals.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Teams and the league were collectively owned by the NBA until the end of 2002, when the NBA sold WNBA teams either to their NBA counterparts in the same city or to a third party as a result of the dot-com bubble. This led to two teams moving: Utah moved to San Antonio, and Orlando moved to Connecticut and became the first WNBA team to be owned by a third party instead of an NBA franchise. This sale of teams also led to two teams folding, the Miami Sol and Portland Fire, because new owners could not be found.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The Women's National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) threatened to strike in 2003 if a new deal was not worked out between players and the league. The result was a delay in the start of the 2003 preseason. The 2003 WNBA Draft was also delayed, and negative publicity was gained from this strike.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: After taking over a struggling franchise in 2002, former Detroit Pistons forward Bill Laimbeer had high hopes for the Detroit Shock in 2003. The team was just 9–23 in 2002. The Shock had three all-stars in the 2003 All-Star Game (Swin Cash, Cheryl Ford, and Deanna Nolan). Laimbeer orchestrated a worst-to-first turnaround and the Shock finished the season 25–9 in first place in the Eastern Conference. Winning the first two rounds of the Playoffs, the Shock faced two-time champion Los Angeles Sparks and Lisa Leslie in the 2003 Finals. The Shock beat the Sparks, winning game three on a three-pointer by Deanna Nolan.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: After the 2003 season, the Cleveland Rockers, one of the league's original eight teams, folded because the owners were unwilling to continue operating the franchise.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Val Ackerman, the first WNBA president, resigned effective February 1, 2005, citing the desire to spend more time with her family. Ackerman later became president of USA Basketball. On February 15, 2005, NBA Commissioner David Stern announced that Donna Orender, who had been serving as the Senior Vice President of the PGA Tour and who had played for several teams in the now-defunct Women's Pro Basketball League, would be Ackerman's successor as of April 2005.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The WNBA awarded an expansion team to Chicago (later named the Sky) in February 2006. In the off-season, a set of rule changes was approved that made the WNBA more like the NBA.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2006, the league became the first team-oriented women's professional sports league to exist for ten consecutive seasons. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary, the WNBA released its All-Decade Team, comprising the ten WNBA players to have contributed, through on-court play and off-court activities, the most to women's basketball during the league's existence.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: After missing out on the Finals in 2004 and 2005, the Shock bounced back in 2006 behind newly acquired Katie Smith, along with six remaining members from their 2003 Finals run (Cash, Ford, Holland-Corn, Nolan, Powell, and Riley). The Shock finished second in the Eastern Conference and knocked off first-seeded Connecticut in the second round of the Playoffs. The Shock faced reigning champion Sacramento Monarchs in a five-game series. The Shock won game five on their home floor.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In December 2006, the Charlotte Bobcats organization announced it would no longer operate the Charlotte Sting. Soon after, the WNBA announced that the Sting would not operate for 2007. A dispersal draft was held on January 8, 2007. Teams selected in inverse order of their 2006 records; Chicago received the first pick.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Former Los Angeles Lakers championship coach Paul Westhead was named head coach of the Phoenix Mercury on October 11, 2005, bringing his up-tempo style of play to the WNBA. This fast-paced offense was perfect for his team, especially after the league shortened the shot clock from 30 seconds to 24 seconds in 2006. Much like the early Houston Comets championship teams, the Phoenix Mercury had risen to prominence led by their own "Big Three" of Cappie Pondexter, Diana Taurasi, and Penny Taylor.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The Mercury was well-suited for the fast offense behind these three players. Phoenix averaged a league-record 88.97 points per game in 2007; teams could not keep up with the new style of play, and the Mercury were propelled into first place in the Western Conference. Facing the reigning champion Detroit Shock, the Mercury imposed their high-scoring offense with hopes of capturing their first title in franchise history. Averaging 93.2 points per game in the Finals series, the Mercury beat Detroit on their home floor in front of 22,076 fans in game five to claim their first-ever WNBA title.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In October 2007 the WNBA awarded another expansion franchise to Atlanta. Atlanta businessman Ron Terwilliger was the original owner of the new team. Citizens of Atlanta were able to vote for their choices for the new team's nickname and colors. The Dream, as they were named, played their first regular-season game on May 17, which was a 67–100 loss to the Connecticut Sun.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Paul Westhead resigned from the Mercury after capturing the 2007 title and Penny Taylor opted to stay home to prepare for the 2008 Summer Olympics, causing the Mercury to falter in 2008. The team posted a 16–18 record and became the first team in WNBA history to miss the Playoffs after winning the championship in the previous season. In their place, the Detroit Shock won their third championship under coach Bill Laimbeer, solidifying their place in WNBA history before Laimbeer resigned early in 2009, effectively ending the Shock dynasty.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: During the 2008 regular season, the first-ever outdoor professional basketball game in North America was played at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York City. The Indiana Fever defeated the New York Liberty 71–55 in front of over 19,000 fans.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Late in 2008, the WNBA took over ownership of one of the league's original franchises, the Houston Comets. The Comets ceased operations on December 1, 2008, after no owners for the franchise could be found. A dispersal draft took place on December 8, 2008, and with the first pick, Sancho Lyttle was taken by the Atlanta Dream.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: After an unsatisfying conclusion in 2008, the Mercury looked to bounce back to championship caliber. New head coach Corey Gaines implemented Paul Westhead's style of play, and the Mercury averaged 92.82 points per game throughout the 2009 season. Helped by the return of Penny Taylor, the Mercury once again locked up first place in the Western Conference and advanced to the 2009 Finals. The championship series was a battle of contrasting styles as the Mercury (number one league offense, 92.82 points per game) had to face the Indiana Fever (number three league defense, 73.55 points per game). The series went five games, including arguably one of the most thrilling games in WNBA history in game one of the series (Phoenix won in overtime, 120–116. The Mercury beat the Fever in game five, this time on their home court, to capture their second WNBA championship.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Not only did Paul Westhead's system influence his Mercury team, but it created a domino effect throughout the league. Young athletic players were capable of scoring more and playing at a faster pace. As a league, the 2010 average of 80.35 points per game was the best, far surpassing the 69.2 average in the league's inaugural season.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: On October 20, 2009, the WNBA announced that the Detroit Shock would relocate to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to become the Tulsa Shock. On November 20, 2009, the WNBA announced that the Sacramento Monarchs had folded due to lack of support from its current owners, the Maloof family, who were also the owners of the Sacramento Kings at the time. The league announced it would seek new owners to relocate the team to the San Francisco Bay area; however, no ownership was found and a dispersal draft was held on December 14, 2009.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The 2010 season saw a tight race in the East, with three teams being tied for first place on the final day of the regular season. Five of the six teams in the East were in first place at some point during the season. The East held a .681 winning percentage over the West, its highest ever. In the 2010 Finals, two new teams represented each conference: the Seattle Storm and the Atlanta Dream. Seattle made their first finals appearance since winning it all in 2004, and Atlanta, coming into the playoffs as a four seed, impressively swept its opponents in the first two rounds to advance to the Finals in only the third year of the team's existence.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: After the 2010 season, President Orender announced she would be resigning from her position as of December 31. On April 21, 2011, NBA commissioner David Stern announced that former Girl Scouts of the USA Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Laurel J. Richie would assume duties as president on May 16, 2011.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The 2011 season began with strong publicity helped by the rising young stars of the league and the NBA lockout.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The 2011 NBA lockout began on July 1, 2011. Unlike the previous lockout, which affected the WNBA, president Laurel J. Richie confirmed that this lockout would not affect the WNBA. If the NBA season was shortened or canceled, the 2012 WNBA season (including the WNBA teams still owned by NBA owners) would run as planned. The lockout ended on November 26, and NBA teams would play a 66-game regular season following the lockout.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Many news outlets began covering the league more frequently. NBA TV, the television home of the NBA scheduled over 70 regular-season games to be televised (along with a dozen more on ESPN2 and ABC). The new influx of young talent into the league gave many teams something to be excited about. Players like Candace Parker of the Sparks, Maya Moore of the Lynx, DeWanna Bonner of the Mercury, Angel McCoughtry of the Dream, Sylvia Fowles of the Sky, Tina Charles of the Sun, and Liz Cambage of the Shock brought a new level of excitement to the game, adding talent to the teams of young veterans such as Diana Taurasi, Seimone Augustus and Cappie Pondexter. The level of play seemed to be evidenced by higher scoring, better defense, and higher shooting percentages. By the end of the 2011 regular season, nine of the twelve teams in the league had increased attendance over their 2010 averages.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Connecticut Sun center Tina Charles set a league record for double-doubles in a season with 23. Also, Sylvia Fowles of the Chicago Sky became only the second player in WNBA history to finish a season averaging at least 20 points (20.0ppg) and 10 rebounds (10.2rpg) per game. The San Antonio Silver Stars experienced boosts from their young players as well; rookie Danielle Adams scored 32 points off the bench in June and fellow rookie Danielle Robinson had a 36-point game in September. Atlanta Dream forward Angel McCoughtry was the first player in league history to average over 20 points per game (21.6ppg) while playing under 30 minutes per game (27.9mpg).


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: McCoughtry led her team to the Finals for the second straight year, but despite breaking her own Finals scoring record, the Dream was swept for the second straight year, this time by the Minnesota Lynx, which won its first title behind a fully healthy Seimone Augustus.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The much-publicized 2013 WNBA Draft produced Baylor University star Brittney Griner, Delaware's Elena Delle Donne, and Notre Dame All American Skylar Diggins (now Diggins-Smith) as the top three picks, the draft was the first to be televised in primetime on ESPN. Griner, Delle Donne, and Diggins have thus been labeled "The Three To See", but with the draft also came standouts such as Tayler Hill, Layshia Clarendon and Alex Bentley. The retirement of legends Katie Smith, Tina Thompson, Ticha Penicheiro, and Sheryl Swoopes coupled with the arrival of highly touted rookies and new rule changes effectively marked the end of an era for the WNBA and the ushering of another.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: On the court, the Minnesota Lynx won their second title in three years, defeating the Atlanta Dream in the Finals and becoming the first team to sweep the playoff since the Seattle Storm.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The promotion of Griner, Delle Donne, and Diggins helped boost television ratings for the league by 28 percent, and half of the teams ended the season profitable. The improved health of the league was on display after the season, when the Los Angeles Sparks' ownership group folded; it took the league only a few weeks to line up Guggenheim Partners to purchase the team, and the franchise also garnered interest from the ownership of the Golden State Warriors.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Two more franchise relocations happened in the following years, as the Tulsa Shock moved in 2016 to the Dallas–Fort Worth region in Texas, being renamed Dallas Wings, and in 2018 the San Antonio Stars went to Nevada, becoming the Las Vegas Aces.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: During the 2018 season, the WNBA players' union opted out of the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the league, which then ended after the 2019 season. In January 2020, the league and union announced that they had reached an agreement on a new CBA to take effect with the 2020 season and running through 2027. Among the features of the new agreement were:


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Also in January 2020, the WNBA announced a new in-season tournament, the Commissioner's Cup, which would begin with the 2020 season. Each team was scheduled to play 10 Cup games during the season: specifically, the first home and road games against each team in its conference. The final Cup games were to be played in July, with the top team in the Cup standings from each conference advancing to a one-off Cup final in August.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The 2020 WNBA schedule originally included a month-long break in July and August to allow players to participate in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The 2020 games were postponed until 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, rendering the break unnecessary. On April 3, 2020, the WNBA announced that the beginning of its own schedule would be postponed. The 2020 entry draft took place as originally scheduled on April 17, although it was done remotely. No details of the revised schedule were announced as of the time of the draft, and the Commissioner's Cup was ultimately not held in 2020.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In June 2020, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced plans for the league to have a 22-game regular season, and a traditional playoff format, to be held exclusively at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida. The players were housed at the Bradenton complex, and all games and practices took place there. Players had until June 25 to let their teams know whether they planned to participate.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: On March 15, 2021, an announcement was made that the WNBA would introduce a ceremonial logo, basketball, and uniforms as part of its 25th anniversary celebratory campaign called 'Count It'. Also as part of the campaign, the league unveiled The W25, consisting of 25 players determined to be the league's greatest and most influential, as chosen by a panel made up of media and pioneering women's players.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The delayed launch of the Commissioner's Cup was officially announced on May 12, 2021, two days before the start of the regular season. The originally planned schedule, with the first home game and first road game of each team against each of its fellow conference members doubling as Cup games, was maintained. All Cup games within each conference were played before the league took its Olympic break after July 11. The Cup final, officially termed the Commissioner's Cup Championship Game, involves the conference leaders in the Cup standings; its first edition was held on August 12 as the league's first game after the Olympic break, and was streamed via Amazon Prime Video. A prize pool of $500,000 is provided for the Cup, with players on the winning team guaranteed a minimum bonus of $30,000 and those of the losing team guaranteed $10,000, and the championship game MVP receiving an extra $5,000.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The WNBA originated with 8 teams in 1997, and through a sequence of expansions, contractions, and relocations currently consists of 12 teams. There have been a total of 18 franchises in WNBA history.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: As of the league's most recent 2022 season, the Las Vegas Aces (formerly the Utah Starzz and San Antonio (Silver) Stars), Los Angeles Sparks, New York Liberty, and Phoenix Mercury are the only remaining franchises that were founded in 1997.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Six WNBA teams are associated with an NBA team from the same market and are known as sister teams. These teams include the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty, the Indiana Pacers and Fever, the Los Angeles Lakers and Sparks, the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx, the Phoenix Suns and Mercury, and the Washington Wizards and Mystics. Of these teams, only the Sparks have completely separate ownership. The Liberty had been associated with the New York Knicks, having been owned by the Knicks' parent company, The Madison Square Garden Company, but the team was sold in January 2019 to a group led by Joseph Tsai, then a minority owner of the Nets and now sole owner of that team. Through the 2017 season, the San Antonio Spurs and Stars were also paired, but that relationship ended in October 2017 when the Stars were bought by MGM Resorts International and moved to Las Vegas.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Three WNBA teams are in the same market as an NBA team but are not affiliated. Though located in the same market, the Chicago Sky is not affiliated with the Bulls, as evidenced by their differing home arenas: the Sky play at Wintrust Arena in Chicago's Near South Side, while the Bulls play at United Center in the city's Near West Side. The Dallas Wings, which had been the Tulsa Shock before moving to the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex after the 2015 season, are not affiliated with the existing NBA team in the Metroplex, the Dallas Mavericks. As with the Sky and Bulls, the Wings and Mavericks play in different areas, with the Wings playing at College Park Center in Arlington as opposed to the Mavericks playing in downtown Dallas at American Airlines Center. While the Atlanta Dream shared State Farm Arena with the Hawks from the Dream's inception in 2008 to 2016 and again in 2019, the Hawks never held any ownership stake in the WNBA team.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The remaining WNBA team, the Seattle Storm, was formerly the sister team of the SuperSonics, but was sold to a Seattle-based group before the SuperSonics relocated and became the Oklahoma City Thunder.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The now-defunct Charlotte Sting, Miami Sol, Portland Fire, Cleveland Rockers, Orlando Miracle, Houston Comets and Sacramento Monarchs were also sister teams of the Hornets, Heat, Trail Blazers, Cavaliers, Magic, Rockets and Kings, respectively. The Utah Starzz were affiliated with the Jazz before relocating to San Antonio as the Silver Stars under the ownership of the parent company of the Spurs in 2003. Becoming the Stars in 2014, they shared the Spurs' team colors. The team would eventually relocate to Las Vegas as the Aces in 2017. The Detroit Shock was the sister team of the Pistons until the teams' owner sold the Shock to investors who moved the team to Tulsa, Oklahoma. During its tenure in Tulsa, it was not affiliated with Oklahoma's NBA team, the Oklahoma City Thunder.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Five teams share a market with an NBA G League team. Two of these also share arenas: the Dream share College Park and the Gateway Center Arena with the College Park Skyhawks, while the Mystics share Washington, D.C. and the Entertainment and Sports Arena with the Capital City Go-Go. Also, the Sparks share the Los Angeles market with the Ontario Clippers and South Bay Lakers, the Wings share the Dallas–Fort Worth market with the Texas Legends, and the Liberty shares the New York City market with the Long Island Nets and Westchester Knicks. Two other teams are located within 150 miles of WNBA teams (the Delaware Blue Coats and Fort Wayne Mad Ants being near the Mystics and Fever, respectively). The Stars were also within 150 miles of a G League team (the Austin Spurs) before their move to Las Vegas. The Shock shared the Tulsa market with the Tulsa 66ers until the latter team was relocated to become the Oklahoma City Blue in 2014, while the Mercury were about 100 miles from the Northern Arizona Suns before the Suns moved to Detroit.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Teams hold training camps in May. Training camps allow the coaching staff to prepare the players for the regular season and determine the 12-woman roster with which they will begin the regular season. After training camp, a series of preseason exhibition games are held.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The WNBA regular season begins in May. Come 2023 during the regular season, each team will play 40 games, 20 each of home & away. As in the NBA, each team hosts and visits every other team at least once every season.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: During years in which the Summer Olympics are held, the WNBA takes a month off in the middle of the season to allow players to practice and compete with their respective national teams. During years in which the FIBA World Cup is held, the WNBA either takes a break for the World Cup or ends its season early, depending on the scheduling of the World Cup.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The 2020 season was planned to be the first for the Commissioner's Cup, an in-season tournament. Each team's first home and away games against each of its conference opponents, all of which were to be played in the first half of the season, were designated as Cup games. After each team played its 10 Cup games, the top team in each conference's Cup standings would advance to the Commissioner's Cup Final, a single match held in August. The COVID-19 pandemic caused the tournament to be scrapped for the time being; the tournament instead launched in 2021 under the originally announced format.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 1999, the league held its first-ever All-Star Game, where the best players of the Eastern Conference played against the best players of the Western Conference. The West dominated play until 2006, when the East finally won a game.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In July, the regular season pauses to celebrate the annual WNBA All-Star Game. The game is part of a weekend-long event, held in a selected WNBA city each year. The game is played on the selected WNBA team's home court. Through the 2017 edition, the All-Star Game featured star players from the Western Conference facing star players from the Eastern Conference. Since 2018, conference affiliations have been ignored in team selections. During the season, voting for All-Star starters takes place among fans, WNBA players, and sports media members. The starters are selected by a weighted vote (fans 50%, players and media 25% each), while reserves are selected by the league's head coaches. The two players with the most fan votes are named team captains, who then fill out their teams in a draft format similar to that currently used for the NBA All-Star Game.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2004, The Game at Radio City was held in a place of a traditional All-Star Game. The 2006 All-Star Game was the first game to feature custom uniforms that match the decade anniversary logo. From 2008 through 2016, no All-Star Game was held in any Summer Olympic year. In 2010, an exhibition game (Stars at the Sun) was held. Although the 2020 Summer Olympics were postponed to 2021 due to COVID-19, no All-Star Game was played in that season. The 2021 season featured the first All-Star Game in an Olympic year since 2000; this contest featured a WNBA all-star team facing the US national team.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Shortly after the All-Star break is the trading deadline. After this date, teams are not allowed to exchange players with each other for the remainder of the season, although they may still sign and release players. Major trades are often completed right before the trading deadline.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The WNBA Playoffs usually begin in late September, though in years of the FIBA World Cup they begin in August. In the current system, the eight best teams by the regular-season record, without regard to conference alignment, qualify for the playoffs. Since 2022, the playoffs have been held in a standard knockout format, with the first round consisting of best-of-three series and the semifinals and finals being best-of-five. Since 2021, Google has been the official sponsor.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Having a higher seed offers several advantages. The higher seed will generally face a weaker team, and will have home-court advantage in each round. In the current playoff format, all quarterfinal series use a 2–1 home-court pattern, which allows the higher seed the opportunity to win the series without having to visit the lower seed. This in turn means that a lower seed that wins one of the first two games will host the series decider.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The quarterfinals is bracketed in the normal manner for an 8-team tournament, with 1 vs. 8 and 4 vs. 5 on one side of the bracket and 2 vs. 7 and 3 vs. 6 on the other. The winners of each quarterfinals series advance to the semifinals, with the bracket not being reseeded. The semifinals use a 2–2–1 home-court pattern, meaning that the higher-seeded team will have home court in games 1, 2, and 5 while the other team plays at home in game 3 and 4. The finals are also played in a 2–2–1 home-court pattern.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The final playoff round, a best-of-five series between the two semifinal winners, is known as the WNBA Finals and is held annually, currently scheduled for October. Each player on the winning team receives a championship ring. Also, the league awards a WNBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award. For this round, the series follows a 2–2–1 pattern, meaning that one team will have home court in games 1, 2, and 5, while the other plays at home in games 3 and 4. The 2–2–1 pattern in the WNBA Finals has been in place since 2005.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The Houston Comets, Minnesota Lynx, and Seattle Storm hold the distinction of having won the most championships with four titles each. The Comets folded in 2008. The Lynx have the most appearances in the championship with six, all occurring in the seven years from 2011 to 2017.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2011, a decade and a half after the launch of the WNBA, only two players remained from the league's inaugural season in 1997: Sheryl Swoopes and Tina Thompson. Lisa Leslie was the longest-tenured player from the 1997 draft class; she spent her entire career (1997–2009) with the Los Angeles Sparks. Sue Bird holds both of the league's most significant longevity records—number of seasons in the league (19) and games played (580).


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The members of the WNBA's All-Decade Team were chosen in 2006 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the WNBA from amongst 30 nominees compiled by fans, media, coach, and player voting. The team was to comprise the 10 best and most influential players of the first decade of the WNBA, with consideration also given to sportsmanship, community service, leadership, and contribution to the growth of women's basketball.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Players for the WNBA's Top 15 Team were chosen in 2011 on the anniversary of the league's fifteenth season from amongst 30 nominees compiled similarly to that of the All-Decade Team process. This process was repeated for the league's 20th anniversary season in 2016 with the selection of the WNBA Top 20@20, and for the 25th anniversary season in 2021 with the selection of The W25.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Over 30 players have scored at least 3,000 points in their WNBA careers. Only 14 WNBA players have reached the 6,000 point milestone: Diana Taurasi, Tina Thompson, Tamika Catchings, Tina Charles, Candice Dupree, Cappie Pondexter, Sue Bird, Katie Smith, Sylvia Fowles, Candace Parker, Lisa Leslie, DeWanna Bonner, Seimone Augustus, and Lauren Jackson. The scoring average leader is Cynthia Cooper, who averaged 21.0 points per game in five seasons with the Houston Comets (1997–2000, 2003).


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2007, Paul Westhead of the Phoenix Mercury became the first person to earn both NBA and WNBA championship rings as a coach.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2008, 50-year-old Nancy Lieberman became the oldest player to play in a WNBA game. She signed a seven-day contract with the Detroit Shock and played one game, tallying two assists and two turnovers in nine minutes of action. By playing in the one game Lieberman broke a record that she had set in 1997 when she was the league's oldest player at 39. The oldest player to have participated in a full season is Bird, who completed her final season in 2022 less than two months before turning 42.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Sue Bird, who played for the Seattle Storm from 2002 until her retirement in 2022 (though she missed the 2013 and 2019 seasons to injury), holds the record for career assists with 3,234 in 580 regular-season games. The record for most assists per game is currently held by Courtney Vandersloot, an American who also holds a Hungarian passport and represents that country internationally. She has averaged 6.64 assists per game during her career with the Chicago Sky (2011–present). Vandersloot also has the top five seasons in assists per game, with 8.1 in 2017, 8.6 in 2018 and 2021, 9.1 in 2019, and 10.0 in 2020.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Around the beginning of September (or late August in Olympic and FIBA World Cup years), the regular season ends. It is during this time that voting begins for individual awards. The Sixth Player of the Year Award (known before 2021 as the "Sixth Woman" award) is given to the best player coming off the bench (must have more games coming off the bench than actual games started). The Rookie of the Year Award is awarded to the most outstanding first-year player. The Most Improved Player Award is awarded to the player who is deemed to have shown the most improvement from the previous season. The Defensive Player of the Year Award is awarded to the league's best defender. The Kim Perrot Sportsmanship Award is awarded to the player who shows outstanding sportsmanship on and off the court. The Coach of the Year Award is awarded to the coach that has made the most positive difference to a team. The Most Valuable Player Award is given to the player deemed the most valuable for her team that season. The Basketball Executive of the Year Award is presented to the team executive most instrumental in his or her team's success in that season. The newest WNBA award, first presented in 2019, is the season-long version of the WNBA Community Assist Award, presented to a player for especially meritorious community service.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Also named are the All-WNBA Teams, the All-Defensive Teams, and the All-Rookie Team; each consists of five players. There are two All-WNBA teams; starting with the 2022 season, each consists of five top players selected without regard to position, with first-team status being the most desirable. There are two All-Defensive teams, each consisting of the top defenders at each position. Finally, there is one All-Rookie team, consisting of the top five first-year players regardless of position. (In all cases, a tie in voting may lead to a team containing six players instead of five.)


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: A number of international players that have played in the WNBA have earned multiple all-stars or won MVP awards:


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Some of these players, among them Penicheiro, Sutton-Brown, and Young played U.S. college basketball.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Rules are governed by standard basketball rules as defined by the NBA, with a few notable exceptions:


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Games are divided into four 10-minute quarters as opposed to the league's original two 20-minute halves of play, similar to FIBA and NCAA women's college rules.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: A recent trend with new WNBA rules has been to match them with a similar NBA rule. Since the 2006 WNBA season:


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2012, the WNBA added the block/charge arc under the basket. As of 2013 the defensive three-second rule and anti-flopping guidelines were introduced. The three-point line was also extended; in 2017, that line extended into the corners to match the NBA's.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Since 2017, Tissot is the official timekeeper for the league, as it uses a unified game clock/shot clock system.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: During the mid-2000s, the NBA spent more than $10 million per year to keep the WNBA financially solvent. In 2007, teams were estimated to be losing $1.5 million to $2 million a year.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Due to the lack of viewership, the WNBA has not been profitable in past years. The league projected losses through the 2010 season to be around $400 million.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The league has begun to do better financially in recent years. In December 2010, Donna Orender said that the league had its first-ever "cash flow positive" team during the 2010 season. In 2011, three teams were profitable, and in 2013, six of the league's 12 teams reported a profit. The league has also signed extended television contracts with ESPN and sponsorship agreements with Boost Mobile.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: As the popularity of the league has grown, players have gained more voice and power to perform as activists in many fields. One of the activist players' main focuses is the inequality between men's and women's sports. Many players such as Brittney Griner, Breanna Stewart, and Maya Moore have spoken about equality between gender, sexual orientation, and race. The players have also supported progressive social and political movements such as Black Lives Matter and others. Shortly after the George Floyd protests began, the league and union decided in 2020 to put Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name slogans on warmup gear and opening weekend uniforms. When team owner Senator Kelly Loeffler criticized the league's support for Black Lives Matter, her team wore black T-shirts with the slogan "VOTE WARNOCK", endorsing her election opponent Raphael Warnock, an African-American pastor who defeated Loeffler.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the WNBA led American professional sports teams in promoting the COVID-19 vaccine. Teams hosted vaccine clinics in their home arenas. In April the league and union's Social Justice Council made a PSA, "Our Health is Worth a Shot", that aired during the WNBA draft. In June 2021, the WNBA announced that 99% of its players had been fully vaccinated.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: On June 1, 2009, the Phoenix Mercury was the first team in WNBA history to announce a marquee sponsorship. The team secured a partnership with LifeLock to brand their jerseys and warm-ups. It was the first branded jersey in WNBA history. Following the expiration of the LifeLock deal, the Mercury secured a new uniform sponsorship deal with Casino Arizona and Talking Stick Resort on February 3, 2014.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Other teams eventually followed in the Mercury's footsteps; some teams feature sponsors prominently on the front of their jerseys, while others have sponsors on the upper left-hand shoulder.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: On August 22, 2011, the WNBA announced a league-wide marquee sponsorship with Boost Mobile. The deal would allow the Boost Mobile logo to be placed on eleven of the 12 teams' jerseys (excluding San Antonio) in addition to branding on the courts and in arenas. A source said the deal is a "multiyear, eight-figure deal".


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2009, the Phoenix Mercury became the first American professional basketball team to feature advertisements on their uniform, when they sold an ad to LifeLock Insurance on the front of their jerseys, leading many people to wonder if ads on NBA uniforms were coming soon. Since then several other WNBA teams have followed suit. The NBA announced in the summer of 2016 that they will begin to feature advertisements on jerseys, with the first team to do so being the Philadelphia 76ers (with a StubHub sticker now on their jerseys).


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Before the start of the 2011 season, every team announced a new look for their uniforms. The supplier of the uniforms for the league, Adidas, upgraded all teams to new high-tech designs, much like they did for the NBA before the start of their season.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: On April 8, 2019, the WNBA announced a multiyear marquee partnership with AT&T, making them the first non-apparel partner to have its logo featured on the front of all 12 team jerseys. The jerseys officially debuted during the 2019 WNBA draft.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Before the 2009 season, the maximum team roster size was changed from 13 players (11 active and 2 inactive) to 11 players (all active). Any team that falls below nine players able to play due to injury or any other factor outside of the control of the team will, upon request, be granted a roster hardship exception allowing the team to sign an additional player or players so that the team will have nine players able to play in an upcoming game or games. As soon as the injured (or otherwise sidelined) player(s) can play, the roster hardship player(s)—not any other player on the roster—must be waived.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In March 2014, the WNBA and players signed a new, eight-year collective bargaining agreement, increasing the number of players on a roster to 12.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The WNBA Draft is held annually every spring. The minimum age is 22 years for American players and 20 years for international players, measured as of December 31 of the calendar year of the draft. For draft purposes, "American" includes those born in the U.S., as well as those who have enrolled in a U.S. college or university, regardless of their citizenship. The draft is three rounds long, with each of the 12 teams in the league (trades aside) getting three picks each. The draft order for the eight teams that made the playoffs the previous year are based on team records, and the team with the highest previous record will pick last. For the remaining top four picks, a selection process similar to the NBA Draft Lottery is conducted for the four teams that did not qualify for the playoffs.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Previously, in 2008, a new six-year collective bargaining agreement was agreed upon between the players and the league. The salary cap for an entire team in 2010 was $827,000 (although it was later lowered to $775,000). By 2013 (the sixth year under this agreement), the cap for an entire team was $900,000. In 2010, the "minimum" salary for a player with three-plus years of experience was $51,000 while the "maximum" salary for a six-plus year player was $101,500 (the first time in league history that players can receive over $100,000). The minimum salary for rookies was $35,190. Many WNBA players supplement their salaries by playing in European, Australian, or more recently Chinese women's basketball leagues during the WNBA offseason. The WNBA has been criticized for paying female players less than their NBA counterparts, although this is attributed to the much greater revenues of the NBA.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The decision of superstar Diana Taurasi to sit out the 2015 WNBA season was seen by some in the media as a harbinger of salary-related troubles in the future. The Russian club for which she was playing at the time, UMMC Ekaterinburg, offered her a bonus well over the league's maximum player salary to sit out that season. Taurasi accepted, largely because she had not had an offseason since playing college basketball more than a decade earlier. Such offers have often been made to star American players, including Taurasi herself, but none were accepted until Taurasi did so in 2015.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: A more recent incident that led to widespread media comment on the WNBA's salary structure was the torn Achilles suffered by reigning WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart while playing for another Russian side, Dynamo Kursk, in the 2019 EuroLeague Women final. The injury came at a time when the WNBA and its players' union were preparing to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement, following the union's announcement in November 2018 that it would opt out of the current CBA after the 2019 season. With overseas leagues offering much higher salaries to many players than the WNBA currently provides, roughly 70% of the league's players go overseas in any given season. While these players do not necessarily play as many games as NBA players do in their seasons, even participants in the NBA Finals get several months of rest in the offseason, something not available for WNBA players who also play overseas. In a story on the ramifications of Stewart's injury, M.A. Voepel of ESPN had this to say about the lead-in to the injury:


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The current CBA, which took effect in 2020, significantly increased minimum and maximum salaries. The minimum league salary in 2020 was $57,000 for players with less than three years of experience, and $68,000 otherwise. For most players, the 2020 maximum salary was $185,000; players who met specified criteria for league service had a maximum of $215,000.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: WNBA players are awarded bonuses for certain achievements. Some of the bonuses given by the league (amount is per player), from 2020 to 2027 (the duration of the current CBA):


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: WNBA champion: $11,356; Runner-up: $5,678; Most Valuable Player: $15,450; All-WNBA First Team member: $10,300; and All-Star Game participant: $2,575. These were only modest increases from amounts provided before 2020.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In recent years, the lack of roster space for rookies, thus hampering their professional development, has become a major issue. While the 2020 CBA led to maximum player salaries nearly doubling from 2019 to 2022, the team cap only increased by slightly less than 40% in that period. Because the cap is a hard cap, many WNBA teams now carry only 11 players on their rosters instead of the maximum 12, leading Stewart to state "We’re at a tipping point. . . . without some easy tweaks, we are no longer a league that has 12 teams and 144 players — it’s more like 133." The WNBA also has no developmental league similar to the NBA G League; Chiney Ogwumike, a vice president of the players' union, publicly called for such a league. While roster limits have always been a significant issue in the league—between the first WNBA draft in 1997 and 2021, more than 40% of drafted players never made a roster—this became especially apparent at the dawn of the 2020s. In one notable example, the 2019 Naismith Trophy winner Megan Gustafson did not make an opening-day roster in 2019, and had only played in parts of the 2019–2021 seasons before being cut in the 2022 preseason. This issue gained major publicity during the week before the start of the 2022 season. The Minnesota Lynx, which began that week with barely over $12,000 of cap room, cut six players, including the 2020 Rookie of the Year Crystal Dangerfield, their 2021 first-round pick Rennia Davis, and both of their 2022 draft picks. The Seattle Storm, whose first 2022 draft pick was in the middle of the second round, waived that pick (Elissa Cunane), and the Las Vegas Aces waived both of their picks, one of them a first-rounder.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Another clause in the 2020 CBA, known as the "prioritization" clause, has been viewed as a potential problem for the league. Because of overseas league commitments, a significant number of WNBA players have reported late to training camp each season. Several overseas leagues and continental club competitions overlap with WNBA training camps, and even with the start of the WNBA season. For example, 55 WNBA players missed the start of training camp in 2021, meaning that most teams were unable to start practice with their full rosters. Starting in 2023, teams will be required to fine players with more than two years of WNBA experience who miss the start of training camp. (Exemptions are provided for national team commitments, graduations, and other significant life events.) Starting in 2024, the league can penalize a veteran player who does not report to camp with a season-long suspension without pay. In a 2021 episode of a podcast hosted by Napheesa Collier and A'ja Wilson, Collier raised the prospect of players choosing to abandon the WNBA for higher overseas salaries, telling Wilson "If I’m not making that much in the league, if it’s not enough for me to survive on during the year, I’m going overseas and having the summer off." When Stewart re-signed with the Seattle Storm as a free agent before the 2022 season, she cited the prioritization clause as the reason she only signed a one-year contract.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The following shows the top jersey sales during the 2021 regular season, based on sales through the WNBA's official online store.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: However, a story by NBC Sports journalist Alex Azzi argued that the WNBA's merchandise rankings were misleading for multiple reasons.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The title of the league's chief executive was "President" before Cathy Engelbert became the first "Commissioner".


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2012, the average attendance per game dropped from 7,955 to 7,457 (−6.3%). Attendance per game stayed consistent at around 7,520 per game. In 2015, the WNBA's attendance per game decreased by 3.4 percent to 7,318. This was a record low for the WNBA since it was created in 1997. Many teams have experienced drops in their attendance; (San Antonio Stars: −37.4%, Washington Mystics: −7.9%, Tulsa Shock: −7.2%) these losses have caused the attendance of the WNBA to drop.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: President Laurel Richie stated that after the 2015 season ends, they will create an expansion committee and begin evaluating if and how the WNBA should go about expanding their reach.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: The 2018 and 2019 seasons each set the lowest average attendance in WNBA history (6,769 and 6,535). However, about half of the decline in attendance from 2017 to 2018 was due to the New York Liberty moving from 19,812-seat Madison Square Garden to the 5,000-seat Westchester County Center. While the Liberty had averaged over 9,000 fans in 2017, James Dolan, then the team's owner, noted that roughly half of the team's attendance in that season came from complimentary tickets. Similarly in 2019, the Washington Mystics moved from the 20,356-seat Capital One Arena to the 4,111-seat Entertainment and Sports Arena. The Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty each saw double-digit percentage losses in 2019, but half of the league's teams saw attendance increases in that season, and the number of sellouts was the same in both seasons (41).


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Currently, WNBA games are televised throughout the U.S. by ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, Twitter, NBATV, CBS, and CBS Sports Network.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In the early years, two women's-oriented networks, Lifetime and Oxygen, also broadcast games, including the first game of the WNBA. NBC showed games from 1997 to 2002 as part of their "NBA on NBC" coverage before the league transferred the rights to ABC/ESPN.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2007, the WNBA and ESPN came to an 8-year television agreement. The agreement would be the first to pay television rights fees to the league's teams. Never before had an agreement promised rights fees to a women's professional league. The agreement ran from 2009 to 2016 and was worth millions of dollars.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In June 2007, the WNBA signed a contract extension with ESPN. The new television deal runs from 2009 to 2016. A minimum of 18 games will be broadcast on ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 each season; the rights to broadcast the first regular-season game and the All-Star game are held by ABC. Additionally, a minimum of 11 postseason games will be broadcast on any of the three stations. Along with this deal, came the first-ever rights fees to be paid to a women's professional sports league. Over the eight years of the contract, "millions and millions of dollars" will be "dispersed to the league's teams".


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2013, the WNBA and ESPN signed a six-year extension on the broadcast deal to cover 2017–2022. In the new deal, a total of 30 games would be shown each season on ESPN networks. Each team would receive around $1 million per year.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: On April 22, 2019, CBS Sports Network reached a multi-year deal to televise 40 regular-season weekend and primetime WNBA games, beginning in the 2019 season.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Some teams offer games on local radio, while all teams have some games broadcast on local television stations:


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: From 2010 to 2011, the regular-season broadcast drew 270,000 viewers a growth of 5 percent from 2010's numbers. As sponsorships continued to grow with deals from ESPN to air WNBA games on ESPN and ESPN 2. The league did experience some success on the digital forefront. It saw increases on its mobile page views by 26 percent along with a major increase in its social media space; Instagram grew by 51 percent this past year.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: In 2009, the WNBA announced the launch of "WNBA LiveAccess", a feature on WNBA.com that provides fans with access to more than 200 live game webcasts throughout the WNBA season. All of the "WNBA LiveAccess" games are then archived for on-demand viewing. Most games (except broadcasts on ABC, ESPN or ESPN2, which are available on ESPN3) are available via this system. The first use of LiveAccess was the E League versus Chicago Sky preseason game.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Before the 2011 season, LiveAccess was given an overhaul, and the system became more reliable and many new features were added. Before the 2012 season, it was announced that users of LiveAccess would have to pay a $4.99 subscription fee to use the service. In 2013, this was increased to $14.99. In 2014 the streaming service was renamed WNBA League Pass.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: WNBA League Pass is available as part of the WNBA App, the free mobile application available on the iPhone, iPad and Android devices and costs US$16.99 for the season. Games airing on ESPN, ESPN2 and CBS Sports Network, as well as other games taking place during the telecast windows of ESPN and ESPN2 games, are not available live on WNBA League Pass. However, those games will be available on-demand shortly after the conclusion of their live broadcast.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: On the 2008 season opening day (May 17), ABC broadcast the Los Angeles Sparks and Phoenix Mercury matchup to showcase new rookie sensation Candace Parker. The game received a little over 1 million viewers.


title: Women's National Basketball Association

text: Ratings still remain poor in comparison to NBA games. In 2008, WNBA games averaged just 413,000 viewers, compared to 1.46 million viewers on ESPN and over 2.2 million on ABC for NBA games. In addition, WNBA games have much poorer visibility, attendance, and ratings than NCAA games. However, ESPN viewership grew 35% in 2018 over 2017. This became the impetus for the multi-year partnership in which CBS Sports Network would broadcast live WNBA games beginning with the 2019 season.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: William I or Wilhelm I (; 22 March 1797 – 9 March 1888) was King of Prussia from 2 January 1861 and German Emperor from 18 January 1871 until his death in 1888. A member of the House of Hohenzollern, he was the first head of state of a united Germany. He was de facto head of state of Prussia from 1858, when he became regent for his brother Frederick William IV, whose death three years later would make him king.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: Under the leadership of William and his minister president Otto von Bismarck, Prussia achieved the unification of Germany and the establishment of the German Empire. Despite his long support of Bismarck as Minister President, William held strong reservations about some of Bismarck's more reactionary policies, including his anti-Catholicism and tough handling of subordinates. In contrast to the domineering Bismarck, William was described as polite, gentlemanly and, while staunchly conservative, more open to certain classical liberal ideas than his grandson Wilhelm II, during whose reign he was known as Wilhelm the Great ().


title: William I, German Emperor

text: The future king and emperor was born William Frederick Louis of Prussia () in the in Berlin on 22 March 1797. As the second son of Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Prince Frederick William, himself son of King Frederick William II, William was not expected to ascend to the throne. His grandfather died the year he was born, at age 53, in 1797, and his father Frederick William III became king. He was educated from 1801 to 1809 by , who was also in charge of the education of William's brother, the Crown Prince Frederick William. At age twelve, his father appointed him an officer in the Prussian army. The year 1806 saw the defeat of Prussia by France and the end of the Holy Roman Empire.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: William served in the army from 1814 onward. Like his father, he fought against Napoleon I of France during the part of the Napoleonic Wars known in Germany as the ("Wars of Liberation", otherwise known as the War of the Sixth Coalition), and was reportedly a very brave soldier. He was made a captain () and won the Iron Cross for his actions at Bar-sur-Aube. The war and the fight against France left a lifelong impression on him, and he had a long-standing antipathy towards the French.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: In 1815, William was promoted to major and commanded a battalion of the "1. Garderegiment". He fought under Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher at the Battles of Ligny and Waterloo. He became a diplomat, engaging in diplomatic missions after 1815. In 1817, he accompanied his sister Charlotte to Saint Petersburg, when she married Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, becoming Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: In 1816, William became the commander of the and in 1818 was promoted to . The next year, William was appointed inspector of the VII. and VIII. Army Corps. This made him a spokesman of the Prussian Army within the House of Hohenzollern. He argued in favour of a strong, well-trained, and well-equipped army. In 1820, William became commander of the and in 1825 was promoted to commanding general of the III. Army Corps.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: Around this time, William became romantically linked with his cousin, Polish noblewoman Elisa Radziwill. In 1826, William was forced to break off the relationship by his father, who deemed it an inappropriate match. It is alleged that Elisa had an illegitimate daughter by William who was brought up by Joseph and Caroline Kroll, owners of the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, and was given the name Agnes Kroll. She married a Carl Friedrich Ludwig Dettman (known as "Louis") and emigrated to Sydney, Australia, in 1849. They had a family of three sons and two daughters. Agnes died in 1904.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: In 1829, William married Princess Augusta, the daughter of Grand Duke Karl Friedrich of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and Maria Pavlovna, the sister of Nicholas I. Their marriage was outwardly stable, but not a very happy one.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: In 1840 his older brother became King of Prussia. Since he had no children, William was first in line to succeed him to the throne and thus was given the title . Against his convictions but out of loyalty towards his brother, William signed the bill setting up a Prussian parliament () in 1847 and took a seat in the upper chamber, the .


title: William I, German Emperor

text: During the Revolutions of 1848, William successfully crushed a revolt in Berlin that was aimed at Frederick William IV. The use of cannons made him unpopular at the time and earned him the nickname (Prince of Grapeshot). Indeed, he had to flee to England for a while, disguised as a merchant. He returned and helped to put down an uprising in Baden, where he commanded the Prussian army. In October 1849, he became governor-general of Rhineland and Westfalia, with a seat at the Electoral Palace in Koblenz.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: During their time at Koblenz, William and his wife entertained liberal scholars such as the historian Maximilian Wolfgang Duncker, August von Bethmann-Hollweg and . William's opposition to liberal ideas gradually softened.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: In 1854, the prince was raised to the rank of a field-marshal and made governor of the federal fortress of Mainz. In 1857 Frederick William IV suffered a stroke and became mentally disabled for the rest of his life. In January 1858, William became Prince Regent for his brother, initially only temporarily but after October on a permanent basis. Against the advice of his brother, William swore an oath of office on the Prussian constitution and promised to preserve it "solid and inviolable". William appointed a liberal, Karl Anton von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, as Minister President and thus initiated what became known as the "New Era" in Prussia, although there were conflicts between William and the liberal majority in the Landtag on matters of reforming the armed forces.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: On 2 January 1861, Frederick William IV died and William ascended the throne as William I of Prussia. In July, a student from Leipzig attempted to assassinate William, but he was only lightly injured. Like Frederick I of Prussia, William travelled to Königsberg and there crowned himself at the Schlosskirche. William chose the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, 18 October, for this event, which was the first Prussian crowning ceremony since 1701 and the only crowning of a German king in the 19th century. William refused to comply with his brother's wish, expressed in Frederick William's last will, that he should abrogate the constitution.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: William inherited a conflict between Frederick William and the liberal Landtag. He was considered to be politically neutral as he intervened less in politics than his brother. In 1862 the Landtag refused an increase in the military budget needed to pay for the already implemented reform of the army. This involved raising the peacetime army from 150,000 to 200,000 men and boost the annual number of new recruits from 40,000 to 63,000. However, the truly controversial part was the plan to keep the length of military service (raised in 1856 from two years) at three years. When his request, backed by his Minister of War Albrecht von Roon was refused, William first considered abdicating, but his son, the Crown Prince, advised strongly against it. Then, on the advice of Roon, William appointed Otto von Bismarck to the office of Minister President in order to force through the proposals. According to the Prussian constitution, the Minister President was responsible solely to the king, not to the "Landtag". Bismarck, a conservative Prussian Junker and loyal friend of the king, liked to see his working relationship with William as that of a vassal to his feudal superior. Nonetheless, it was Bismarck who effectively directed the politics, domestic as well as foreign; on several occasions he gained William's assent by threatening to resign.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: During his reign, William was the commander-in-chief of the Prussian forces in the Second Schleswig War against Denmark in 1864 and the Austro-Prussian War in 1866. After the latter was won by Prussia, William wanted to march on to Vienna and annex Austria, but was dissuaded from doing so by Bismarck and his son Crown Prince Frederick William. Bismarck wanted to end the war quickly, so as to allow Prussia to ally with Austria if it needed to at a later date; Frederick William was also appalled by the casualties and wanted a speedy end to hostilities. During a heated discussion, Bismarck threatened to resign if William continued to Vienna; Bismarck got his way. William had to content himself with becoming the "de facto" ruler of the northern two-thirds of Germany. Prussia annexed several of Austria's allies north of the Main, as well as Schleswig-Holstein. It also forced Saxe-Lauenburg into a personal union with Prussia (which became a full union in 1878).


title: William I, German Emperor

text: In 1867, the North German Confederation was created as a federation (federally organised state) of the North German and Central German states under the permanent presidency of Prussia. William assumed the "Bundespräsidium", the presidium of the Confederation; the post was a hereditary office of the Prussian crown. Not "expressis verbis", but in function he was the head of state. Bismarck intentionally avoided a title such as "Präsident" as it sounded too republican. William became also the constitutional "Bundesfeldherr", the commander of all federal armed forces. Via treaties with the South German states, he also became commander of their armies in times of war. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, William was in command of all the German forces at the crucial Battle of Sedan.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: During the Franco-Prussian War, the South German states joined the North German Confederation, which was reorganized as the German Empire "(Deutsches Reich)." The title of "Bundespräsidium" was amended with the title of German Emperor "(Deutscher Kaiser)." This was decided on by the legislative organs, the Reichstag and Bundesrat, and William agreed to this on 8 December in the presence of a Reichstag delegation. The new constitution and the title of Emperor came into effect on 1 January 1871.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: William, however, hesitated to accept the constitutional title, as he feared that it would overshadow his own title as King of Prussia. He also wanted it to be "Kaiser von Deutschland" ("Emperor of Germany"), but Bismarck warned him that the South German princes and the Emperor of Austria might protest. William eventually—though grudgingly—relented and on 18 January, he was formally proclaimed as emperor in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. The date was chosen as the coronation date of the first Prussian king in 1701. In the national memory, 18 January became the day of the foundation of the Empire ("Reichsgründungstag"), although it did not have a constitutional significance.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: To many intellectuals, the coronation of William was associated with the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire. Felix Dahn wrote a poem, ""Macte senex Imperator"" (Hail thee, old emperor) in which he nicknamed William "Barbablanca" (whitebeard), a play on the name of the medieval emperor Frederick "Barbarossa" (redbeard). According to the King asleep in mountain legend, Barbarossa slept under the Kyffhäuser mountain until Germany had need of him. William I was thus portrayed as a second coming of Barbarossa. The Kyffhäuser Monument portrays both emperors.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: In 1872, he arbitrated a boundary dispute between the United Kingdom and the United States, deciding in favor of the U.S. and placing the San Juan Islands of modern-day Washington within U.S. national territory, thus ending the 12-year bloodless Pig War.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: In his memoirs, Bismarck describes William as an old-fashioned, courteous, infallibly polite gentleman and a genuine Prussian officer, whose good common sense was occasionally undermined by "female influences". This was a reference to William's wife, who had been educated by, among others Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and was intellectually superior to her husband. She was also at times very outspoken in her opposition to official policies as she was a liberal. William, however, had long been strongly opposed to liberal ideas. Despite possessing considerable power as Kaiser, William left the task of governing mostly to his chancellor, limiting himself to representing the state and approving Bismarck's every policy. In private he once remarked on his relationship with Bismarck: "It is difficult to be emperor under such a chancellor."


title: William I, German Emperor

text: On 11 May 1878, a plumber named Emil Max Hödel failed in an assassination attempt on William in Berlin. Hödel used a revolver to shoot at the then 81-year-old Emperor, while he and his daughter, Princess Louise, paraded in their carriage on "Unter den Linden". When the bullet missed, Hödel ran across the street and fired another round which also missed. In the commotion one of the individuals who tried to apprehend Hödel suffered severe internal injuries and died two days later. Hödel was seized immediately. He was tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and executed on 16 August 1878.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: A second attempt to assassinate William I was made on 2 June 1878 by Dr. Karl Nobiling. As the Emperor drove past in an open carriage, the assassin fired two shots from a shotgun at him from the window of a house off the "Unter den Linden". William was severely wounded and was rushed back to the palace. Nobiling shot himself in an attempt to commit suicide. While William survived this attack, the assassin died from his self-inflicted wound three months later.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: Despite the fact that Hödel had been expelled from the Social Democratic Party, his actions were used as a pretext by Bismarck to ban the party. To do this, Bismarck partnered with Ludwig Bamberger, a Liberal, who had written on the subject of Socialism, "If I don't want any chickens, then I must smash the eggs." These attempts on William's life thus became the pretext for the institution of the Anti-Socialist Law, which was introduced by Bismarck's government with the support of a majority in the Reichstag on 18 October 1878, for the purpose of fighting the "socialist" and working-class movement. These laws deprived the Social Democratic Party of Germany of its legal status; prohibited all organizations, workers’ mass organizations and the socialist and workers’ press; decreed confiscation of socialist literature; and subjected Social-Democrats to reprisals. The laws were extended every 2–3 years. Despite the reprisals the Social Democratic Party increased its influence among the masses. Under pressure of the mass working-class movement the laws were repealed on 1 October 1890.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: In August 1878, Russian Tsar Alexander II, William's nephew, wrote a letter (known as "Ohrfeigenbrief") to him complaining about the treatment Russian interests had received at the Congress of Berlin. In response William, his wife Augusta, and his son the crown prince travelled to Russia (against the advice of Bismarck) to mend fences in face-to-face talks. However, by once again threatening to resign, Bismarck overcame the opposition of William to a closer alliance with Austria. In October, William agreed to the Dual Alliance ("Zweibund") between Germany and Austria-Hungary, which was directed against Russia.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: Another assassination attempt failed on 18 September 1883 when William unveiled the "Niederwalddenkmal" in Rüdesheim. A group of anarchists had prepared an attack using dynamite which failed due to the wet weather.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 organized by Otto von Bismarck can be seen as the formalization of the Scramble for Africa. Claiming much of the left-over territories in Africa and Oceania that were yet unclaimed, Germany managed to build the large German colonial empire.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: Despite the assassination attempts and William's unpopular role in the 1848 uprising, he and his wife were very popular, especially in their later years. Many people considered them the personification of "the old Prussia" and liked their austere and simple lifestyle. William died on 9 March 1888 in Berlin after a short illness, less than two weeks before his 91st birthday. He was buried on 16 March at the Mausoleum at Park Charlottenburg. He was succeeded by his son Frederick who was already in an ill health himself (suffering from throat cancer). Frederick spent the 99 days of his reign fighting his illness before dying and being succeeded by his eldest son Wilhelm on 15 June.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: To honour him a large number of memorials/statues were erected all over the country over the following years. The best known among them are the Kyffhäuser monument (1890–96) in Thuringia, the monument at Porta Westfalica (1896) and the mounted statue of William at the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz (1897). The statue next to the Stadtschloss, Berlin (1898) was melted down by the government of East Berlin in 1950.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: William was a Lutheran member of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces. It was a United Protestant denomination, bringing together Reformed and Lutheran believers.


title: William I, German Emperor

text: His full title as king of Prussia was "William, by the Grace of God, King of Prussia; Margrave of Brandenburg, Burgrave of Nuremberg, Count of Hohenzollern; Sovereign and Supreme Duke of Silesia and of the County of Glatz; Grand Duke of the Lower Rhine and of Posen; Duke of Saxony, of Westphalia, of Angria, of Pomerania, Lüneburg, Holstein and Schleswig, of Magdeburg, of Bremen, of Guelders, Cleves, Jülich and Berg, Duke of the Wends and the Kassubes, of Crossen, Lauenburg and Mecklenburg; Landgrave of Hesse and Thuringia; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia; Prince of Orange; Prince of Rügen, of East Friesland, of Paderborn and Pyrmont, of Halberstadt, Münster, Minden, Osnabrück, Hildesheim, of Verden, Cammin, Fulda, Nassau and Moers; Princely Count of Henneberg; Count of Mark, of Ravensberg, of Hohenstein, Tecklenburg and Lingen, of Mansfeld, Sigmaringen and Veringen; Lord of Frankfurt."


title: Zip2

text: Zip2 was a company that provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers. The company was founded in Palo Alto, California as Global Link Information Network in 1995, by Greg Kouri and brothers Elon and Kimbal Musk. Initially, Global Link provided local businesses with an Internet presence, but later began to assist newspapers in designing online city guides before being purchased by Compaq Computer in 1999.


title: Zip2

text: Global Link Information Network was founded in 1995 by brothers Elon and Kimbal Musk and Greg Kouri in Palo Alto, California with money raised from a small group of angel investors, plus US$8,000 from Kouri. In Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk, it is claimed that the Musks' father, Errol Musk, provided them with US$28,000 during this time, but Elon Musk later denied this. He later clarified that his dad provided around 10% of US$200,000 as part of a later funding round.


title: Zip2

text: Initially, Global Link provided local businesses with an Internet presence by linking their services to searchers and providing directions. Elon Musk combined a free Navteq database with a Palo Alto business database to create the first system.


title: Zip2

text: In 1996, Global Link received US$3 million in investments from Mohr Davidow Ventures and officially changed its name to Zip2. Davidow Ventures changed the fundamental strategy of Zip2 from localised direct to business sales to instead selling national back end software packages to newspapers to build their own directories. Elon Musk was appointed the Chief Technology Officer and Rich Sorkin became the chief executive officer. Zip2 trademarked "We Power the Press" as its official slogan and continued to grow. Zip2 struck deals with "The New York Times", Knight Ridder, and Hearst Corporation, and its collaboration with newspapers made it a major component of "the U.S. newspaper industry's response to the online city guide industry", according to the "Editor & Publisher".


title: Zip2

text: By 1998, the company had partnered with about 160 newspapers to develop guides to cities, either locally or at full scale. According to chairman and co-founder Elon Musk, twenty of those newspapers led to full-scale city guides. "The New York Times" reported that Zip2 also provided newspapers with an online directory, calendar, and email alongside their core offering.


title: Zip2

text: Zip2 allowed for two-way communication between users and advertisers. Users could message advertisers and have that message forwarded to their fax machine. Likewise, advertisers could fax users and users could view that fax using specific URLs.


title: Zip2

text: One Zip2 product was called "Auto Guide". AutoGuide connected online newspaper users with local dealership or private party car sellers.


title: Zip2

text: In April 1998, Zip2 attempted to merge with CitySearch, its main competitor. While Musk initially supported the merger, he persuaded the board of directors not to proceed with it. According to "The New York Times", the two companies "cited incompatibilities in cultures and technology" as the reason for the merger's failure.


title: Zip2

text: In February 1999, Compaq Computer paid US$305 million to acquire Zip2. Elon and Kimbal Musk, the original founders, netted US$22 million and US$15 million respectively. The company was purchased to enhance Compaq's AltaVista web search engine.


title: Taoiseach

text: The Taoiseach is the head of government of Ireland. The office is appointed by the president of Ireland upon the nomination of Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Oireachtas, Ireland's national legislature) and the office-holder must retain the support of a majority in the Dáil to remain in office.


title: Taoiseach

text: The Irish word "" means "chief" or "leader", and was adopted in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland as the title of the "head of the Government or Prime Minister". It is the official title of the head of government in both English and Irish, and is not used for the prime ministers of other countries, who are instead referred to in Irish by the generic term "príomh-aire". The phrase "an Taoiseach" is sometimes used in an otherwise English-language context, and means the same as "the Taoiseach".


title: Taoiseach

text: The current Taoiseach is Leo Varadkar TD, leader of Fine Gael, who again took office on 17 December 2022 following a planned rotation as part of the coalition agreement between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party. Micheál Martin TD held the post from June 2020 until December 2022 as part of that agreement.


title: Taoiseach

text: Under the Constitution of Ireland, the Taoiseach is nominated by a simple majority of the voting members of Dáil Éireann. They are then formally appointed to office by the President, who is required to appoint whomever the Dáil designates, without the option of declining to make the appointment. For this reason, the Taoiseach may, informally, be said to have been "elected" by Dáil Éireann.


title: Taoiseach

text: If the Taoiseach loses the support of a majority in Dáil Éireann, they are not automatically removed from office. Instead, they are compelled either to resign or to persuade the President to dissolve the Dáil. If the President refuses to grant a dissolution, this effectively forces the Taoiseach to resign. To date, no president has exercised this prerogative, although the option arose in 1944 and 1994, and twice in 1982. The Taoiseach may lose the support of Dáil Éireann by the passage of a vote of no confidence, or implicitly, through the failure of a vote of confidence. Alternatively, the Dáil may refuse supply. In the event of the Taoiseach's resignation, they continue to exercise the duties and functions of office until the appointment of a successor.


title: Taoiseach

text: The Taoiseach nominates the remaining members of the Government, who are then, with the consent of the Dáil, appointed by the President. The Taoiseach is authorised to advise the President to dismiss cabinet ministers from office; by convention the President follows this advice. The Taoiseach is further responsible for appointing eleven members of the Seanad.


title: Taoiseach

text: The Department of the Taoiseach is the government department which supports and advises the Taoiseach in carrying out their various duties. The Taoiseach is assisted by one or more Ministers of State at the Department of the Taoiseach, one of whom is the Government Chief Whip.


title: Taoiseach

text: Since 2013, the Taoiseach's annual salary is €185,350. It was cut from €214,187 to €200,000 when Enda Kenny took office, before being cut further to €185,350 under the Haddington Road Agreement in 2013.


title: Taoiseach

text: A proposed increase of €38,000 in 2007 was deferred when Brian Cowen became Taoiseach and in October 2008, the government announced a 10% salary cut for all ministers, including the Taoiseach. However this was a voluntary cut and the salaries remained nominally the same with both ministers and Taoiseach essentially refusing 10% of their salary. This caused controversy in December 2009 when a salary cut of 20% was based on the higher figure before the refused amount was deducted. The Taoiseach is also allowed an additional €118,981 in annual expenses.


title: Taoiseach

text: There is no official residence of the Taoiseach. In 2008 it was reported speculatively that the former Steward's Lodge at Farmleigh adjoining the Phoenix Park would become the official residence of the Taoiseach; however no official statements were made nor any action taken. The house, which forms part of the Farmleigh estate acquired by the State in 1999 for €29.2m, was renovated at a cost of nearly €600,000 in 2005 by the Office of Public Works. Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern did not use it as a residence, but his successor Brian Cowen used it occasionally.


title: Taoiseach

text: "" ("More of Cloyne") is a traditional air collected by Patrick Weston Joyce in 1873. "Amhrán Dóchais" ("Song of Hope") is a poem written by Osborn Bergin in 1913. John A. Costello chose the air as his musical salute. The salute is played by army bands on the arrival of the Taoiseach at state ceremonies. Though the salute is often called "", Brian Ó Cuív argued "" is the correct title.


title: Taoiseach

text: The words and (deputy prime minister) are both from the Irish language and of ancient origin. Though the Taoiseach is described in the Constitution of Ireland as "the head of the Government or Prime Minister", its literal translation is "chieftain" or "leader". Although Éamon de Valera, who introduced the title in 1937, was a democratic politician who had in the past associated with socialist paramilitaries, it has sometimes been remarked that the meaning "leader" in 1937 made the title similar to the titles of fascist dictators of the time, such as (Hitler), (Mussolini) and (Franco). , in turn, refers to the system of tanistry, the Gaelic system of succession whereby a leader would appoint an heir apparent while still living.


title: Taoiseach

text: In Scottish Gaelic, translates as clan chief and both words originally had similar meanings in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland. The related Welsh language word (current meaning: 'prince') has a similar origin and meaning. It is hypothesised that both derive ultimately from the proto-Celtic 'chieftain, leader'.


title: Taoiseach

text: Although the Irish form is sometimes used in English instead of 'the Taoiseach', the English version of the Constitution states that he or she "shall be called … the Taoiseach".


title: Taoiseach

text: In 1937 when the draft Constitution of Ireland was being debated in the Dáil, Frank MacDermot, an opposition politician, moved an amendment to substitute "Prime Minister" for the proposed "Taoiseach" title in the English text of the Constitution. It was proposed to keep the "Taoiseach" title in the Irish language text. The proponent remarked:


title: Taoiseach

text: The President of the Executive Council, Éamon de Valera, gave the term's meaning as "chieftain" or "Captain". He said he was "not disposed" to support the proposed amendment and felt the word "Taoiseach" did not need to be changed. The proposed amendment was defeated on a vote and "Taoiseach" was included as the title ultimately adopted by plebiscite of the people.


title: Taoiseach

text: The modern position of Taoiseach was established by the 1937 Constitution of Ireland and is the most powerful role in Irish politics. The office replaced the position of President of the Executive Council of the 1922–1937 Irish Free State.


title: Taoiseach

text: The positions of Taoiseach and President of the Executive Council differed in certain fundamental respects. Under the Constitution of the Irish Free State, the latter was vested with considerably less power and was largely just the chairman of the cabinet, the Executive Council. For example, the President of the Executive Council could not dismiss a fellow minister on his own authority. Instead, the Executive Council had to be disbanded and reformed entirely to remove a member. The President of the Executive Council also did not have the right to advise the Governor-General to dissolve Dáil Éireann on his own authority, that power belonging collectively to the Executive Council.


title: Taoiseach

text: In contrast, the Taoiseach created in 1937 possesses a much more powerful role. The holder of the position can both advise the President to dismiss ministers and dissolve Parliament on his own authority—advice that the President is almost always required to follow by convention. His role is greatly enhanced because under the Constitution, he is both and chief executive. In most other parliamentary democracies, the head of state is at least the nominal chief executive, while being bound by convention to act on the advice of the cabinet. In Ireland, however, executive power is explicitly vested in the Government, of which the Taoiseach is the leader.


title: Taoiseach

text: Since the Taoiseach is the head of government, and may remove ministers at will, many of the powers specified, in law or the constitution, to be exercised by the government as a collective body, are in reality at the will of the Taoiseach. The Government almost always backs the Taoiseach in major decisions, and in many cases often merely formalises that decision at a subsequent meeting after it has already been announced. Nevertheless, the need for collective decision making on paper acts as a safeguard against an unwise decision made by the Taoiseach.


title: Taoiseach

text: Generally, where there have been multi-party or coalition governments, the Taoiseach has been the leader of the largest party in the coalition. One exception to this was John A. Costello, who was not leader of his party, but an agreed choice to head the government, because the other parties refused to accept then Fine Gael leader Richard Mulcahy as Taoiseach. In 2011 Taoiseach Brian Cowen, resigned as party leader and was succeeded by Micheál Martin, but continued as Taoiseach until the formation of a new government following a general election.


title: Taoiseach

text: Before the enactment of the 1937 Constitution, the head of government was the President of the Executive Council. This office was first held by W. T. Cosgrave of Cumann na nGaedheal from 1922 to 1932, and then by Éamon de Valera of Fianna Fáil from 1932 to 1937. By convention, Taoisigh are numbered to include Cosgrave; therefore, Micheál Martin is considered the 15th Taoiseach, not the 14th.


title: Taoiseach

text: Biographies are also available of de Valera, Lemass, Lynch, Cosgrave, FitzGerald, Haughey, Reynolds and Ahern. FitzGerald wrote an autobiography, while an authorised biography was produced of de Valera.


title: Byte

text: The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as The Internet Protocol () refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet. Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness. The first bit is number 0, making the eighth bit number 7.


title: Byte

text: The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as "syllables" or "slab", before the term "byte" became common.


title: Byte

text: The modern de facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the binary-encoded values 0 through 255 for one byte—2 to the power of 8 is 256. The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers commonly optimize for this usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit byte. Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes, respectively.


title: Byte

text: The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper-case letter B by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Internationally, the unit "octet", symbol o, explicitly defines a sequence of eight bits, eliminating the potential ambiguity of the term "byte".


title: Byte

text: The term "byte" was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in the instruction.


title: Byte

text: Another origin of "byte" for bit groups smaller than a computer's word size, and in particular groups of four bits, is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term while working with Jules Schwartz and Dick Beeler on an air defense system called SAGE at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1956 or 1957, which was jointly developed by Rand, MIT, and IBM. Later on, Schwartz's language JOVIAL actually used the term, but the author recalled vaguely that it was derived from AN/FSQ-31.


title: Byte

text: Early computers used a variety of four-bit binary-coded decimal (BCD) representations and the six-bit codes for printable graphic patterns common in the U.S. Army (FIELDATA) and Navy. These representations included alphanumeric characters and special graphical symbols. These sets were expanded in 1963 to seven bits of coding, called the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) as the Federal Information Processing Standard, which replaced the incompatible teleprinter codes in use by different branches of the U.S. government and universities during the 1960s. ASCII included the distinction of upper- and lowercase alphabets and a set of control characters to facilitate the transmission of written language as well as printing device functions, such as page advance and line feed, and the physical or logical control of data flow over the transmission media. During the early 1960s, while also active in ASCII standardization, IBM simultaneously introduced in its product line of System/360 the eight-bit Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC), an expansion of their six-bit binary-coded decimal (BCDIC) representations used in earlier card punches.


title: Byte

text: The prominence of the System/360 led to the ubiquitous adoption of the eight-bit storage size, while in detail the EBCDIC and ASCII encoding schemes are different.


title: Byte

text: In the early 1960s, AT&T introduced digital telephony on long-distance trunk lines. These used the eight-bit μ-law encoding. This large investment promised to reduce transmission costs for eight-bit data.


title: Byte

text: The development of eight-bit microprocessors in the 1970s popularized this storage size. Microprocessors such as the Intel 8008, the direct predecessor of the 8080 and the 8086, used in early personal computers, could also perform a small number of operations on the four-bit pairs in a byte, such as the decimal-add-adjust (DAA) instruction. A four-bit quantity is often called a nibble, also "nybble", which is conveniently represented by a single hexadecimal digit.


title: Byte

text: The term "octet" is used to unambiguously specify a size of eight bits. It is used extensively in protocol definitions.


title: Byte

text: Historically, the term "octad" or "octade" was used to denote eight bits as well at least in Western Europe; however, this usage is no longer common. The exact origin of the term is unclear, but it can be found in British, Dutch, and German sources of the 1960s and 1970s, and throughout the documentation of Philips mainframe computers.


title: Byte

text: The unit symbol for the byte is specified in IEC 80000-13, IEEE 1541 and the Metric Interchange Format as the upper-case character B.


title: Byte

text: In the International System of Quantities (ISQ), B is the symbol of the "bel", a unit of logarithmic power ratio named after Alexander Graham Bell, creating a conflict with the IEC specification. However, little danger of confusion exists, because the bel is a rarely used unit. It is used primarily in its decadic fraction, the decibel (dB), for signal strength and sound pressure level measurements, while a unit for one-tenth of a byte, the decibyte, and other fractions, are only used in derived units, such as transmission rates.


title: Byte

text: The lowercase letter o for octet is defined as the symbol for octet in IEC 80000-13 and is commonly used in languages such as French and Romanian, and is also combined with metric prefixes for multiples, for example ko and Mo.


title: Byte

text: More than one system exists to define larger units based on the byte. Some systems are based on powers of 10; other systems are based on powers of 2. Nomenclature for these systems has been the subject of confusion. Systems based on powers of 10 reliably use standard SI prefixes ("kilo", "mega", "giga", ...) and their corresponding symbols (k, M, G, ...). Systems based on powers of 2, however, might use binary prefixes ("kibi", "mebi", "gibi", ...) and their corresponding symbols (Ki, Mi, Gi, ...) "or" they might use the prefixes K, M, and G, creating ambiguity.


title: Byte

text: While the numerical difference between the decimal and binary interpretations is relatively small for the kilobyte (about 2% smaller than the kibibyte), the systems deviate increasingly as units grow larger (the relative deviation grows by 2.4% for each three orders of magnitude). For example, a power-of-10-based yottabyte is about 17% smaller than power-of-2-based yobibyte.


title: Byte

text: Definition of prefixes using powers of 10—in which 1 "kilobyte" (symbol kB) is defined to equal 1,000 bytes—is recommended by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The IEC standard defines eight such multiples, up to 1 yottabyte (YB), equal to 1000 bytes. The additional prefixes "ronna-" for 1000 and "quetta-" for 1000 were adopted by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in 2022.


title: Byte

text: This definition is most commonly used for data-rate units in computer networks, internal bus, hard drive and flash media transfer speeds, and for the capacities of most storage media, particularly hard drives, flash-based storage, and DVDs. Operating systems that use this definition include macOS, iOS, Ubuntu, and Debian. It is also consistent with the other uses of the SI prefixes in computing, such as CPU clock speeds or measures of performance.


title: Byte

text: A system of units based on powers of 2 in which 1 kibibyte (KiB) is equal to 1,024 (i.e., 2) bytes is defined by international standard IEC 80000-13 and is supported by national and international standards bodies (BIPM, IEC, NIST). The IEC standard defines eight such multiples, up to 1 yobibyte (YiB), equal to 1024 bytes. The natural binary counterparts to "ronna-" and "quetta-" were given in a consultation paper of the International Committee for Weights and Measures' Consultative Committee for Units (CCU) as "robi-" (Ri, 1024) and "quebi-" (Qi, 1024), but they have not yet been adopted by the IEC and ISO.


title: Byte

text: An alternate system of nomenclature for the same units (referred to here as the "customary convention"), in which 1 "kilobyte" (KB) is equal to 1,024 bytes, 1 "megabyte" (MB) is equal to 1024 bytes and 1 "gigabyte" (GB) is equal to 1024 bytes is mentioned by a 1990s JEDEC standard. Only the first three multiples (up to GB) are mentioned by the JEDEC standard, which makes no mention of TB and larger. The customary convention is used by the Microsoft Windows operating system and random-access memory capacity, such as main memory and CPU cache size, and in marketing and billing by telecommunication companies, such as Vodafone, AT&T, Orange and Telstra.


title: Byte

text: This definition was used by Apple Inc. operating systems prior to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and iOS 10 before switching to units based on powers of 10.


title: Byte

text: Various computer vendors have coined terms for data of various sizes, sometimes with different sizes for the same term even within a single vendor. These terms include "double word", "half word", "long word", "quad word", "slab", "superword" and "syllable". There are also informal terms. e.g., "half byte" and "nybble" for 4 bits, "octal K" for .