Word.ws English Dictionary

byte order

byte order noun: order in which bytes are written or read, in memory or through a transmission; choices being big-endian or little-endian.

Noun

byte order (plural byte orders)

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

Adjective

byte order (not comparable)

  1. Relating to the order of bytes, the endianness.
    • 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.2001 July 6, “Sockets”, in The GNU C Library Reference Manual, Edition 0.10, archived from the original on 07 Dec 2003, The Internet Namespace, Byte Order Conversion

Synonyms of byte order

Forms of byte order

pluralbyte orders

Words formed from byte order

Questions about byte order

What does byte order mean?
Byte order means order in which bytes are written or read, in memory or through a transmission; choices being big-endian or little-endian.
What part of speech is byte order?
Byte order can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of byte order?
The plural of byte order is byte orders.

Words near byte order in the dictionary

  1. byte
  2. byte bucket
  3. byte buckets
  4. byte code
  5. byte codes
  6. byte order
  7. byte order mark
  8. byte order marks
  9. byte pair encoding
  10. byte pair encodings
  11. byte-order mark

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: byte order (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-byte order.wav.

Cite this entry: “byte order.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/byte_order. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.