Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Gigabyte
/ˈɡɪɡəbaɪt/noun
A unit of digital information equal to a thousand megabytes.
The Greek roots
γίγας
gígas
giant
Literally: “giant byte”
Follow a root:γίγας2 words
The story of the word
The metric system adopted giga- for a factor of a billion in 1960, taking it from the Γίγαντες, the giants who grew out of earth soaked in the blood of Ouranos and lost their war against the Olympians. Their defeat, the Gigantomachy, is carved along the great altar of Pergamon. As a measure of how the word has shrunk: a gigabyte of plain text is roughly a thousand thick novels, and it now fits on a card the size of a fingernail.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
giantgiganticgigahertzgigantism
In a sentence
The video call ate four gigabytes before anyone noticed the data cap.