Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Terabyte
/ˈtɛrəbaɪt/noun
A unit of digital information equal to a thousand gigabytes.
The Greek roots
τέρας
téras
monster, portent
Literally: “monster byte”
Follow a root:τέρας1 word
The story of the word
The prefix was adopted in 1960 from τέρας, which means a monster and, before that, an omen, since a malformed birth was read as a sign from the gods. Teratology, the study of birth defects, comes from the same word. The choice was also convenient because tera- looks like tetra-, four, and a tera is the fourth power of a thousand, so the metric committee got a pun for free.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
Same family
teratologyteratogenteratoma
In a sentence
The survey generates about a terabyte of raw images every night.