kilobyte
noun
kilobyte is a noun meaning “One thousand (10³, or 1,000) bytes” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled K-I-L-O-B-Y-T-E and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 23 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of kilobyte is kilobytes.
What does kilobyte mean?
noun
- 1
One thousand (10³, or 1,000) bytes.
- 2
informalA kibibyte.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce kilobyte?
- US
Kilobyte has 3 syllables (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-kilobyte.oga, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of kilobyte
- kilobytes plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is kilobyte?
Kilobyte appears about once in every 23 million words in written English, the 145,125th 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 abbreviate kilobyte?
Wiktionary records 3 abbreviations of kilobyte: KB, kB, kbyte.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Kilobyte in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense 1024 bytes:
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 kilobyte come from?
Coined in the 1960s, from kilo- (“thousand”) + byte.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).