Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective computing Of a computer, storing multibyte numbers with the most significant byte at a greater (little-endian) or lower (big-endian) address.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

end +‎ -ian; from a passage in Gulliver's Travels in which an emperor, after cutting his finger after opening an egg at the large end, commands his subjects to open them at the small end; those who comply are called “Little-Endians”, while those who rebel by opening their eggs at the large end are called “Big-Endians.”

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Examples

  • There have been plenty of other apparently minor mistakes in computing that continue to create real headaches: for example, the different line end characters used on Windows, Unix, and Apple; or the big-endian/little-endian distinction in hardware integer representation.

    The Web’s Inventor Regrets One Small Thing - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com 2009

  • A number of .jpeg files, with headers, each prepended by a 24-bit (3-byte) little-endian value representing the size, and buffered at the end with nulls, so that they are at predictable locations (the jpeg modulo).

    Miriam Ruiz 2007

  • As I said earlier, the oiv data files are in big-endian format and therefore need to be accessed differently than the others.

    Hansen Code « Climate Audit 2007

  • And so unmeasurable is the ambition of princes, that he seemed to think of nothing else than reducing the whole empire of Blefuscu into a province, and governing it by a viceroy; of destroying the Big-endian exiles, and compelling that people to break the smaller end of their eggs, by which he would remain the sole monarch of the whole world.

    Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 Charles Herbert Sylvester

  • Set/GetSocketOptions does nto work for Big endian Processors

    Site Home Colin Miller 2011

  • Big – endian exiles, and compelling that people to break the smaller end of their eggs, by which he would remain the sole monarch of the whole world.

    Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World 1726

  • And so unmeasureable is the ambition of princes, that he seemed to think of nothing less than reducing the whole empire of Blefuscu into a province, and governing it, by a viceroy; of destroying the Big - endian exiles, and compelling that people to break the smaller end of their eggs, by which he would remain the sole monarch of the whole world.

    Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1706

  • And so unmeasureable is the ambition of princes, that he seemed to think of nothing less than reducing the whole empire of Blefuscu into a province, and governing it, by a viceroy; of destroying the Big - endian exiles, and compelling that people to break the smaller end of their eggs, by which he would remain the sole monarch of the whole world.

    Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1706

  • And so unmeasureable is the ambition of princes, that he seemed to think of nothing less than reducing the whole empire of Blefuscu into a province, and governing it, by a viceroy; of destroying the Big - endian exiles, and compelling that people to break the smaller end of their eggs, by which he would remain the sole monarch of the whole world.

    Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1706

  • Answer is PowerShell ISE by default saves the scripts file (ps1) in "Unicode big endian" and that doesn't work while signing the scripts.

    Site Home 2010

Comments

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  • In computing, synonymous with byte order. A system is said to be "big endian" if the most significant byte in an integer is stored at the lowest memory address, with successive addresses holding incrementally less significant byte values. In other words, big endian doesn't mean "ends big", but rather "big end first".

    Little endian is the opposite: bytes are stored least-significant (or smallest) first.

    September 25, 2007

  • One little, two little, three little endians... ;-)

    September 25, 2007

  • The first citation is odd -- the book is some sort of compilation of selections (for children?) -- the actual locus is, of course, Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

    January 1, 2012