byte

UK/baɪt/US/baɪt/

nounB1+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,628 of 15,258mostly written

Other forms: bytes

A byte is the small unit computer storage is counted in. A gigabyte, how many bytes, a byte of data.

It is eight bits and holds one character of plain text, which is why file sizes and text lengths line up so neatly. The spelling was changed from bite on purpose, so it could not be misread as bit. Note that a nibble is four bits, which is a joke that stuck.

Definitions of byte

1nounbyteA unit of computer storage, eight bits.B1+
“The old computer's memory was measured in thousands of bytes, not billions.”

byte is a unit of data.

Where it comes from

Coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956, respelt from bite so it would not be mistaken for bit.

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.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Numbers & Measurement

Practise this word

byte in the wild

The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits.
Byte
The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size.
Byte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information.
Kilobyte
The kibibyte is defined as 1024 bytes, avoiding the ambiguity issues of the kilobyte.
Kilobyte
UTF-8 supports all 1,112,064 valid Unicode code points using a variable-width encoding of one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units.
UTF-8

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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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