kilobyte
kilobyte Lexical Profile
kilobyte Game Scores & Validity
• noun
A unit of digital information or computer memory storage equal to 1,000 bytes in the decimal metric system, or 1,024 bytes (2 to the 10th power) in traditional binary architecture.
"The simple plain-text configuration file takes up less than a single kilobyte of hard drive space."
Word Nuance & Usage
Do not confuse a kilobyte (abbreviated KB or kB) with a kilobit (abbreviated kb or kbit), which represents only one-eighth the amount of digital data. Additionally, in traditional binary computing contexts, a kilobyte equals 1,024 bytes (now formally called a kibibyte), whereas in the standard decimal metric system it equals exactly 1,000 bytes.
Word Origin & Etymology
Coined in the 1960s by combining the metric prefix 'kilo-' (from Ancient Greek 'khilioi', meaning 'thousand') with 'byte', a respelling of 'bite' introduced by IBM computer scientist Werner Buchholz in 1956.