endianness
endianness noun: the property of being either big-endian or little-endian.
Noun
endianness (countable and uncountable, plural endiannesses)
- The property of being either big-endian or little-endian.
- When reading and writing data a byte at a time, it is necessary to know the endianness of the computer you are working on.
- The Unicode standard does not specifically does not require a particular endianness of text written in Unicode; both big- and little-endian encodings are allowed.1999, Elliotte Rusty Harold, Java Input/Output
Examples of endianness in a sentence
- Endianness comes in two varieties: big and little.2006, Michael Barr, Anthony Massa, Programming Embedded Systems, page 99:
- An endianness difference can cause problems if a computer unknowingly tries to read binary data written in the opposite format from a shared memory location or file.2012, Albert J. Marcella, Cyber Forensics, page 116:
Forms of endianness
| plural | endiannesses |
|---|
Origin of endianness
From endian + -ness.
Questions about endianness
- What does endianness mean?
- Endianness means the property of being either big-endian or little-endian.
- How do you use endianness in a sentence?
- Endianness comes in two varieties: big and little.
- What part of speech is endianness?
- Endianness is a noun.
- What is the plural of endianness?
- The plural of endianness is endiannesses.
Words near endianness in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: endianness (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: en-uk-endianness.ogg.
Cite this entry: “endianness.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/endianness. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.