Byte

How to spell byte

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce byte

What does byte mean?

1. nounA unit of digital information, typically made up of eight bits.

Byte in a sentence

• Each byte in the file stores a single character of text.

• The program reads one byte at a time from the disk.

Where does byte come from?

Language of origin: Other

Byte is a deliberately coined word, attributed to the computer scientist Werner Buchholz, who used it in 1956 while working on the IBM Stretch computer. It described a group of bits handled together, originally a variable size before settling on the familiar group of eight. The spelling was chosen as a play on 'bite', a manageable chunk of data, but the 'i' was changed to 'y' on purpose so that nobody would confuse it in writing or print with 'bit', the smallest unit of information. That single swapped vowel is the whole point of the spelling: 'bit' is one binary digit, while 'byte' is a bigger mouthful of them. Because the word was engineered rather than inherited, its odd 'yte' ending has no older relatives in English and simply has to be memorised.

How the word is built

• byte (a single, indivisible word; deliberately respelled from 'bite' to avoid confusion with 'bit')

Words that sound like byte

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• bite: To cut into or grip something with the teeth.