Word.ws English Dictionary

gigaword

/ˈɡɪɡəˌwɜːrd/

gigaword noun: a unit of storage or capacity equal to (or 2³⁰ = 1,073,741,824) words. It is given the "giga" prefix because of the relative proximity of this value to 10⁹.

Noun

gigaword (plural gigawords)

  1. A unit of storage or capacity equal to (or 2³⁰ = 1,073,741,824) words. It is given the "giga" prefix because of the relative proximity of this value to 10⁹.
    • Frank let him have two white mice, a rabbit, and an elderly Airedale, along with a large time slice on the hospital's MEG-computational facilities, a few gigawords of data storage capacity, petty cash for wiring, and a stern warning that "any human 'volunteers' had better be named Robbins, Chun, or...1969 September, JOHN W. CAMPBELL, editor, Analog, volume LXXXIV, number 1, page 98
    • It has been calculated that a 100 ps pulse width would be short enough for a 1-Gigaword/second, 6 bit converter and …1977, North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development, AGARD Conference Proceedings, number 219, AGARD, pages 23-16

Forms of gigaword

pluralgigawords

Origin of gigaword

From giga- + word.

Questions about gigaword

What does gigaword mean?
Gigaword means a unit of storage or capacity equal to (or 2³⁰ = 1,073,741,824) words. It is given the "giga" prefix because of the relative proximity of this value to 10⁹.
What part of speech is gigaword?
Gigaword is a noun.
How do you pronounce gigaword?
Gigaword is pronounced /ˈɡɪɡəˌwɜːrd/.
What is the plural of gigaword?
The plural of gigaword is gigawords.

Words near gigaword in the dictionary

  1. gigawatt-hour
  2. gigawatt-hours
  3. gigawatt-year
  4. gigawatt-years
  5. gigawatts
  6. gigaword
  7. gigawords
  8. gigaxonin
  9. gigayacht
  10. gigayachts
  11. gigayear

Source and license

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

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