byte

Pronunciation: /baɪt/

The English word “byte” has 2 meanings listed here.

noun

A short sequence of bits (binary digits) that can be operated on as a unit by a computer; the smallest usable machine word.
A unit of computing storage equal to eight bits, which can represent any of 256 distinct values.

Etymology

An alteration of the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. Coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM 7030 Stretch computer.

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byte pair encoding

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.