megabyte

UK/ˈmɛɡəˌbaɪt/US/ˈmɛɡəˌbaɪt/

nounB1+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,782 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: megabytes

A megabyte is a unit of digital storage of about a million bytes. A ten megabyte file, megabytes of data, charged per megabyte.

The exact figure depends on who is counting, since a disc maker means a round million while a computer often means 1,048,576. A megabyte held a whole program once and now barely holds one photograph.

Definitions of megabyte

1nounmegabyteAbout a million bytes.B1+
“The photograph came to just under three megabytes.”

megabyte is a unit.

Where it comes from

From mega- + byte.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Numbers & Measurement

Practise this word

megabyte in the wild

The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information.
Megabyte
Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes of information.
Megabyte
A large value is often expressed with a metric prefix (as in megabyte and gigabyte) or a binary prefix (as in mebibyte and gibibyte).
File size
Introduced 1972, it is similar to IBM's 1964-introduced 2310, and uses a disk pack similar to IBM's 2315 disk pack, although the latter only held 1 megabyte.
RK05
Sign up for a basic account was free, and provided 250 megabytes of upload bandwidth a month.
Twango

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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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