byte order

English

Pronunciation

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Noun

byte order (plural byte orders)

1. (computing) Order in which bytes are written or read, in memory or through a transmission; choices being big-endian or little-endian.
   • 1980 April 1, Danny Cohen, On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace‎^[1], IETF, archived from the original on 2014-07-224:

     Under this order the first bit to be sent is the LEAST significant bit (B0) of the MOST significant byte (C0) of the first word, followed by the rest of the bits of this byte, then the same right-to-left bit order inside the left-to-right byte order.

Usage notes

byte order seems to be less favored than its synonym endianness, except when needing precision to contrast it with its coordinated term bit order.

Synonyms

• endianness

Hypernyms

• order

Coordinate terms

• bit order

Adjective

byte order (not comparable)

1. Relating to the order of bytes, the endianness.
   • 2001 July 6, “Sockets”, in The GNU C Library Reference Manual‎^[2], Edition 0.10, archived from the original on 7 December 2003, The Internet Namespace, Byte Order Conversion:

     So that machines with different byte order conventions can communicate, the Internet protocols specify a canonical byte order convention for data transmitted over the network. This is known as network byte order.

Derived terms

• byte order mark
• byte-order mark

References

• Also published at Cohen, Danny (1981 October) “On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace”, in IEEE Computer‎^[3], volume 14, number 10, →DOI, pages 48–54