byte order

plural byte orders

1. computingOrder in which bytes are written or read, in memory or through a transmission; choices being big-endian or little-endian.

   Under this order the first bit to be sent is the LEAST significant bit (B0) of the MOST significant byte (C0) of the first word, followed by the rest of the bits of this byte, then the same right-to-left bit order inside the left-to-right byte order.

   1980 April 1, Danny Cohen, On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace, IETF, archived from the original on 2014-07-224

   Synonyms: endianness

1. not comparableRelating to the order of bytes, the endianness.

   So that machines with different byte order conventions can communicate, the Internet protocols specify a canonical byte order convention for data transmitted over the network. This is known as network byte order.

   2001 July 6, “Sockets”, in The GNU C Library Reference Manual, Edition 0.10, archived from the original on 07 Dec 2003, The Internet Namespace, Byte Order Conversion