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petabyte

/ˈpɛtəbaɪt/noun

petabyte is a noun meaning “One quadrillion (10¹⁵, or 1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes or 1,000 terabytes” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled P-E-T-A-B-Y-T-E, and it appears about once in every 25 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of petabyte is petabytes.

What does petabyte mean?

noun

  1. 1

    One quadrillion (10¹⁵, or 1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes or 1,000 terabytes.

  2. 2

    informalA pebibyte.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce petabyte?

  • /ˈpɛtəbaɪt/

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-petabyte.oga, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of petabyte

  • petabytes plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is petabyte?

Petabyte appears about once in every 25 million words in written English, the 150,355th 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 petabyte?

Wiktionary records one abbreviation of petabyte: PB.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Petabyte in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes:

LanguageWords
Frenchpétaoctet
GermanPetabyte
Portuguesepetabyte

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 petabyte come from?

From peta- + byte.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).