Editing Bit (section)

=== Multiple bits ===
{{redirect|MBit|the technical high school|MBIT}}
{{Quantities of bits}}
Multiple bits may be expressed and represented in several ways. For convenience of representing commonly reoccurring groups of bits in information technology, several [[units of information]] have traditionally been used. The most common is the unit [[byte]], coined by [[Werner Buchholz]] in June 1956, which historically was used to represent the group of bits used to encode a single [[character (computing)|character]] of text (until [[UTF-8]] multibyte encoding took over) in a computer<ref name="Bemer_2000"/><ref name="Buchholz_1956"/><ref name="Buchholz_1977"/><ref name="Buchholz_1962"/><ref name="Bemer_1959"/> and for this reason it was used as the basic [[address space|addressable]] element in many [[computer architecture]]s. By 1993, the trend in hardware design had converged on the 8-bit [[byte]].<ref>{{cite web |title=ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993(en) Information technology — Vocabulary — Part 1: Fundamental terms |url=https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:2382:-1:ed-3:v1:en |access-date=8 January 2025 |page=01.02.09}}</ref>  However, because of the ambiguity of relying on the underlying hardware design, the unit [[Octet (computing)|octet]] was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of eight&nbsp;bits.

Computers usually manipulate bits in groups of a fixed size, conventionally named "[[Word (computer architecture)|words]]". Like the byte, the number of bits in a word also varies with the hardware design, and is typically between 8 and 80&nbsp;bits, or even more in some specialized computers. In the early 21st century, retail personal or server computers have a word size of 32 or 64&nbsp;bits.

The [[International System of Units]] defines a series of decimal prefixes for multiples of standardized units which are commonly also used with the bit and the byte. The prefixes [[kilo-|kilo]] (10<sup>3</sup>) through [[yotta-|yotta]] (10<sup>24</sup>) increment by multiples of one thousand, and the corresponding units are the [[kilobit]] (kbit) through the [[yottabit]] (Ybit).