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It's my understanding that the word byte is a contraction of the two words:by eight. Also (fun fact) a half a byte, 4 bits, is called a nibble. May be I'm out of touch but I have never seen a word referred to as a byte outside of an 8 bit processor, words are composed of bytes.

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In elder days, there were many systems with 6-bit and 7-bit bytes. It took a while to standardize on 8 bits.

So no, it's not a contraction of "by eight". It's just a different spelling for "bite", as a pun on "a bite of bits".

I've always spelled it "nybble".

But I've seen "byte" used to refer to other numbers of bits lots of times, although primarily in the old days. Not so much anymore. I think the meaning has changed with time and has become fixed on "8 bits", but it was not always so.

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