bit

UK/ˈbɪt/US/ˈbɪt/

nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — bite sits at #876mostly spoken

Other forms: bits

A bit is the metal bar that sits in a horse's mouth. Take the bit, a snaffle bit.

It rests on the gum where there are no teeth, which is why a horse tolerates it at all. A horse that takes the bit between its teeth cannot be stopped, which is where the phrase comes from.

Definitions of bit

1nounhorseThe metal bar that sits in a horse's mouth.C1
“The bit rests on the gum where there are no teeth.”

bit is a part.

Where it comes from

Old English bite, a bite or cut, from the same root as the verb bite.

Middle English
bitte
English, today
bit

Built from

bite · Old English — a bite; cut

From Middle English bitte. From Middle English bitte, bite, from Old English bita (“bit; fragment; morsel”) and bite (“a bite; cut”), from Proto-Germanic bitô and bitiz; both from Proto-Indo-European bʰeyd- (“to split”). More at bite. 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Horses & Riding

Practise this word

bit in the wild

The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communication.
Bit
The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values.
Bit
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits.
Byte
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.
Byte
In computer architecture, 8-bit integers or other data units are those that are 8 bits wide (1 octet).
8-bit computing

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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bit