Endianness

In computing, endianness is the order or sequence of bytes of a word of digital data in computer memory or data communication which is identified by describing the impact of the "first" bytes, meaning at the smallest address or sent first.

• big-endian (BE) system - stores the most significant byte of a word at the smallest memory address and the least significant byte at the largest.

• little-endian (LE) system - stores the least-significant byte at the smallest address.

• Bi-endianness is a feature supported by numerous computer architectures that feature switchable endianness in data fetches and stores or for instruction fetches.

Other orderings are generically called middle-endian or mixed-endian.

Danny Cohen introduced the terms big-endian and little-endian into computer science for data ordering in an Internet Experiment Note published in 1980.

The adjective endian has its origin in the writings of 18th century Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift.

In the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, he portrays the conflict between sects of Lilliputians divided into those breaking the shell of a boiled egg from the big end or from the little end.

As a boy, the grandfather of the emperor whom Gulliver met had cut his finger while opening an egg from the big end. The boy's father and emperor at the time published an imperial edict commanding all his subjects to break their eggs from the small end. The people resented the change, sparking six rebellions of "Big-Endians." Swift did not use the term Little-Endians in the work. Cohen makes the connection to Gulliver's Travels explicit in the appendix to his 1980 note.