nibble
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈnɪbl̩/
ipa: /ˈnɪb(ə)l/
rhymes: -ɪbəl
Forms: form: nibbles
form: nybble
form: nybl
Etymology: A pun on the homophony of byte and bite.
Senses: examples: text: I own several abaci and two books on how to use them, but they all have four counters below the bar and one counter above it. […] The bottom four counters of each abacus can be used to represent a "nybble," and the upper counter on each can be used for parity.
ref: 1978 May 22, William B. Adams, “Letters to the Editor: Query on Abacus”, in E. Drake Lundell Jr., editor, Computerworld: The Newsweekly for the Computer Community, volume XII, number 21, Newton, Mass.: CW Communications, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 26, column 4:
text: At every negative-going transition it reads a 4-bit ADPCM nybble (there are 2 nybbles per byte) and stores it in a memory-resident table.
ref: 1983 June, Steve Ciarcia, “Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar: Use ADPCM for Highly Intelligible Speech Synthesis”, in Lawrence J. Curran, editor, Byte: The Small Systems Journal, volume 8, number 6, Peterborough, N.H.: Byte Publications, McGraw-Hill, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 41, column 1:
text: Data is being received by a system in serial sequences of four bit nybbles. (A nybble is usually defined as a four bit grouping.) […] Our mission, should we decide to accept it, is to test each nybble and determine whether or not the four bits constitute a valid BCD (8421) number.
ref: 1985, Ronald C. Emery, “General Sequential Circuitry”, in Digital Circuits: Logic and Design (Electrical Engineering and Electronics; 25), New York, N.Y.; Basel, Basel-Stadt: Marcel Dekker, →ISBN, page 171:
text: Each pixel has an integer gray scale value associated with it to indicate its shade of gray. […] Gray scale values can be stored in either 4 bits (nibble) or 8 bits (byte).
ref: 1991 September, W. Rick Smith, Greg L[ynn] Somers, “Photographing, Scanning, and Editing an Image”, in SUNSHINE: A Light Environment Simulation System Based on Hemispherical Photographs (Research Paper SO-267), New Orleans, La.: Southern Forest Experiment Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, →OCLC, page 2, column 2:
text: That is, the lower nibble (the 4 bits 1010 = A) has been masked to zero.
ref: 1993, Richard E. Haskell, Introduction to Computer Engineering: Logic Design and the 8086 Microprocessor, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, →ISBN, page 287:
text: Similarly, it's easy to convert a binary number such as %1100011010110010 into its hexadecimal equivalent. All we have to do is to split the binary value into 4-bit nybbles and to map each nybble onto its corresponding hexadecimal digit.
ref: 2005, Clive “MAX” Maxfield, Alvin Brown, The Definitive Guide to How Computers Do Math […], Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Interscience, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 20:
text: A nibble is a collection of four bits. It wouldn't be a particularly interesting data structure except for two items: BCD (binary coded decimal) numbers and hexadecimal numbers. It takes four bits to represent a single BCD or hexadecimal digit. With a nibble, one can represent up to 16 distinct values. […] [H]exadecimal and BCD digits are the primary items we can represent with a single nibble.
ref: 2006, A. K. Singh, Manish Tiwari, Arun Prakash, Digital Principles Switching Theory, New Delhi: New Age International, →ISBN, pages 15–16:
text: Each half [of a byte], a group of four consecutive bits, called a semibyte or nibble, is represented by a unique hexadecimal digit; for instance: 00101101 = 0x2D. The high nibble contains the most-significant four bits: 0010 = 0x2. The low nibble contains the least-significant four bits: 1101 = 0xD.
ref: 2016, Giuseppe Di Cataldo, “Base 2, 8, and 16 Notations”, in Stack Frames: A Look from Inside, New York, N.Y.: Apress, Springer Science+Business Media, →DOI, →ISBN, page 47:
topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
glosses: A unit of memory equal to half a byte, or chiefly four bits.