Bit is a portmanteau of binary digit.
A byte is 8 bits.
A nibble is 4 bits (half a byte).
Is there a word for a pair of bytes?
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Sign up to join this communityBit is a portmanteau of binary digit.
A byte is 8 bits.
A nibble is 4 bits (half a byte).
Is there a word for a pair of bytes?
It is word
which is 16 bits.
They are (in order of increasing size)
BIT, NIBBLE, BYTE, WORD, DWORD, FWORD, QWORD, KiloByte, MegaByte
Please note that a word
is the standard memory bus width in your architecture. It can be 8 bits or 16 bits or 32 bits or 64 bits based on the CPU.
You can read more about assembler(binary) here (this is a random link I found on google for your reference, but I verified that the information is correct about the above mentioned. Search on google).
word
is 16 bits in a conventional sense. As a matter of fact, the most common architecture even in the present day is x86-32, in which a word
is 16 bits. Like @coleopterist mentioned in his comment, more details can be found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_information
– Fr0zenFyr
Mar 20 '13 at 10:42
I will offer this up as a suggestion, though I don't believe it was ever used in serious writing. A playte is unambiguously 16 bits, and also; chawmp in the context of a 32 bit machine.
I would've just commented on the previous answer but I don't have enough reputation yet, so I'll leave an alternate answer instead.
Also, I believe nybble is the correct spelling for four bits.