big-endian
big-endian adjective: storing the most significant byte of a multibyte number at a lower address than the least significant byte; that is, "big end" first.
Adjective
big-endian (not comparable)
- Storing the most significant byte of a multibyte number at a lower address than the least significant byte; that is, "big end" first.
- Most big Unix machines are big-endian, but Intel x86 machines and older Digital machines are little-endian.1999, W. Curtis Preston, Unix Backup and Recovery, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 132
- Transmitting the most significant byte of a multibyte number before transmitting the least significant byte; that is, "big end" first.
- The network octet order for all protocols in the TCP/IP protocol suite is big-endian. A big-endian computer system need not perform any conversion in building TCP/IP protocol headers from integers stored in its memory.1994, James Martin, Joe Leben, TCP/IP Networking: Architecture, Administration, and Programming, Prentice Hall, page 203
Synonyms of big-endian
- network byte-order
Antonyms
Origin of big-endian
See the etymology for endian.
Questions about big-endian
- What does big-endian mean?
- Big-endian means storing the most significant byte of a multibyte number at a lower address than the least significant byte; that is, "big end" first.
- What part of speech is big-endian?
- Big-endian is an adjective.
Words near big-endian in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: big-endian (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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