1,885
edits
Changes
Word
,no edit summary
== Common Names for Various Word Sizes ==
== Bit ==A bit is a single ''binary digit'', a value that can take one of two states. These states may be referred to as:* 1 or 0* True or False* On or Off (electrically) === Byte ===
A byte is a collection of eight '''bits'''. It is a convenient size for use with many small character sets such as [[http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso646.html ASCII]], [[http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html ISO8859]], and [http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso646.html#EBCDIC EBCDIC]], and can also be used with the [[http://czyborra.com/utf/#UTF-8 UTF-8]] encoding of Unicode. It is often viewed as the smallest hardware word size that makes sense for general-purpose computing.
Most computers with larger hardware word sizes continue to rank memory, storage, and data sizes in bytes (or prefixed multiples of bytes) for comparability. For example, an x86_64 system will be advertised as having "16 gigabytes" of memory instead of "4 gigawords".
=== Octet ===
Another name for [[#Byte|byte]], commonly used in telecommunication standards and in French.
=== Nibble ===
A nibble (or nybble) is a half-byte, corresponding to one hexadecimal or BCD digit.
