Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Megabyte
/ˈmɛɡəbaɪt/noun
A unit of digital information equal to a million bytes, or 1,048,576 in the binary reckoning.
The Greek roots
μέγας
mégas
great, large
Literally: “great byte”
Follow a root:μέγας6 words
The story of the word
Half of this word is ancient and half was invented at IBM in 1956, when Werner Buchholz coined byte and deliberately misspelled it so that nobody would slur it into bit. Mega- had been standard for a million in the metric system since the 1870s, taken from μέγας. The two systems disagree: storage makers count a million bytes, memory counts 2 to the 20th, and the gap is why a new drive always reports less capacity than the box promised.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1960s
Same family
megaphonemegalithmegalomaniamegahertzomega
In a sentence
A single photo from that camera runs to about eight megabytes.