byte
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /baɪt/
rhymes: -aɪt
homophone: bight
homophone: bite
homophone: by't
Forms: form: bytes
Etymology: An alteration of the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. Coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM 7030 Stretch computer.
Senses: topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
glosses: A short sequence of bits (binary digits) that can be operated on as a unit by a computer; the smallest usable machine word.
examples: text: The word “hello” fits into five bytes of ASCII code.
text: If you look at the photograph of the interior of the Spectrum[…], you will see that there is one ROM chip, and 16 smaller RAM chips. These chips give the Spectrum its memory. The memory consists of 65536 storage units that each contain one byte (a number from 0 to 255).
ref: 1984, Neil Ardley, “The ZX Spectrum+ Memory Map”, Learn About Your ZX Spectrum+ (3), in Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ User Guide, Dorling Kindersley, →ISBN, page 48:
text: With a varchar, the storage is always the actual number of characters you have stored plus 2 bytes. So a varchar(20) with a 5-character word will take up 7 bytes, with the extra 2 bytes holding a size reference for SQL Server.
ref: 2008, Eric Johnson, Joshua Jones, A Developer's Guide to Data Modeling for SQL Server:
topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
synonyms: B
octet
qualifier: most commonly
glosses: A unit of computing storage equal to eight bits, which can represent any of 256 distinct values.
Coordinate terms: sense: Previous
word: nibble
sense: Previous
word: nybble
sense: Next
word: word
sense: Previous
word: bit
sense: Next
word: kilobyte
Derived terms: sense: Compound words
word: brontobyte
sense: Compound words
word: byte bucket
sense: Compound words
word: bytecode
sense: Compound words
word: byte order
sense: Compound words
word: byter
sense: Compound words
word: bytesexual
sense: Compound words
word: bytestring
sense: Compound words
word: bytewise
sense: Compound words
word: exabyte
sense: Compound words
word: exbibyte
sense: Compound words
word: geopbyte
sense: Compound words
word: gibibyte
sense: Compound words
word: gigabyte
sense: Compound words
word: hellabyte
sense: Compound words
word: interbyte
sense: Compound words
word: kibibyte
sense: Compound words
word: kilobyte
sense: Compound words
word: mebibyte
sense: Compound words
word: megabyte
sense: Compound words
word: multibyte
sense: Compound words
word: nonbyte
sense: Compound words
word: pebibyte
sense: Compound words
word: petabyte
sense: Compound words
word: qubibyte
sense: Compound words
word: qubyte
sense: Compound words
word: quebibyte
sense: Compound words
word: queccabyte
sense: Compound words
word: quettabyte
sense: Compound words
word: robibyte
sense: Compound words
word: ronnabyte
sense: Compound words
word: tebibyte
sense: Compound words
word: terabyte
sense: Compound words
word: tryte
sense: Compound words
word: yobibyte
sense: Compound words
word: yottabyte
sense: Compound words
word: zebibyte
sense: Compound words
word: zettabyte
sense: other phrases
word: byte code
sense: other phrases
word: byte order mark
sense: other phrases
word: byte-order mark
sense: other phrases
word: least significant byte
sense: other phrases
word: most significant byte
sense: other phrases
word: multi-byte
Related terms: word
doubleword
longword
char