Byte

/bi:t/ An amount of memory or data smaller than a word; usually eight bits; enough to represent one character; the smallest addressable unit of storage.

On modern architectures a byte is nearly always 8 bits and characters are usually represented in ASCII in the least significant seven bits.

Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. Originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360 computer. The word was coined by mutating the word "bite" so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit.

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Abbreviation for binary term, a unit of storage capable of holding a single character. On almost all modern computers, a byte is equal to 8 bits. Large amounts of memory are indicated in terms of kilobytes (1,024 bytes), megabytes (1,048,576 bytes), and gigabytes (1,073,741,824 bytes). A disk that can hold 1.44 megabytes, for example, is capable of storing approximately 1.4 million characters, or about 3,000 pages of information.