The byte, unit of digital data

The byte is eight bits, and it is the smallest unit this converter carries. One byte codes a Latin letter, a digit or a space; anything outside that alphabet costs more.

The word itself was built to be misread as little as possible. Byte was spelled with a y so that it could not be confused with bit in handwriting, and French went further by coining octet on the eight bits, which removes the ambiguity in one stroke. The size of a letter is not fixed either: in UTF-8 a Latin character takes one byte, an accented one takes two, and an ideogram takes three, which is why a Japanese text weighs roughly three times an English text of the same length. That is also why a file size never divides evenly by the number of characters on screen.

The byte in other units

Digital storage