byte
/baɪt/noun
byte is spelled B-Y-T-E: 4 letters and one syllable. It appears 1.4 times per million words in written English, the 23,835th most frequent word form (wordfreq, 2021 data). People search “bite vs byte” about 10 times a month (Bing, United States). As a noun, byte means “A short sequence of bits (binary digits) that can be operated on as a unit by a computer; the smallest usable machine word” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). The plural of byte is bytes.
How many letters and syllables are in byte?
| Letters | 4: B-Y-T-E |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 1 (from its American pronunciation) |
| In writing | 1.4 times per million words; the 23,835th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | none measured in search |
| Pairs people search | |
| Sounds like |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026).
How common is byte?
Byte appears 1.4 times per million words in written English, the 23,835th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce byte?
- /baɪt/
Byte has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-byte.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Words people confuse with byte
Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).
Sounds like: bight, bite (Wiktionary's homophone list; some hold only in some accents).
Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).
Forms of byte
- bytes plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does byte mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
A short sequence of bits (binary digits) that can be operated on as a unit by a computer; the smallest usable machine word.
- 2
A unit of computing storage equal to eight bits, which can represent any of 256 distinct values.
The word “hello” fits into five bytes of ASCII code.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Byte in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense 8-bit unit:
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does byte come from?
An alteration of the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. Coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM 7030 Stretch computer.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).