Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A member of the Lilliputian party in Swift's “Gulliver's Travels” who maintained, in opposition to the little-endians, that boiled eggs should be cracked at the big end; hence, one of any corresponding set of disputers about trifles.
- Pertaining or relating to the big end of an egg, or any equally foolish matter, as a subject of controversy.
Wiktionary
- adj. computing Of a computer, storing the most significant byte of a multibyte number at a lower address than the least significant byte; that is, "big end" first.
- adj. computing Of a computer, transmitting most significant byte of a multibyte number before transmitting the least significant byte; that is, "big end" first.
Etymologies
- See the etymology for endian (Wiktionary)
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
“As I said earlier, the oiv data files are in big-endian format and therefore need to be accessed differently than the others.”
“Developers only have problems when they use processor-specific features like SSE/Altivec/NEON, or when they share data between processors of different endianness - which doesn't apply to ARM/PowerPC, since they are both big-endian.”
“Unicode is used for all sorts of puposes, not just XML encoding, and so it also has a mechanism to distinguish between small-endian and big-endian encodings, which determine which byte comes first in UTF-16 and UTF-32.”
“· Little-endian and big-endian architectures are supported.”
“Therefore, the keys are stored in a kind of big-endian format, with a prefix byte in front that indicates magnitude and length:”
“NOVI SAD, Serbia, April 13, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- RT-RK, a leading provider of embedded system design and system software development in the field of consumer electronics, today announced successful porting of a big-endian version of the Android ™ platform for the MIPS® architecture.”
“The big-endian version of Android is available immediately and includes support for select MIPS-Based ™ platforms.”
“Companies can now leverage the power of Android for both big-endian and little-endian versions of MIPS processors for their SoCs targeting devices such as digital TVs (DTVs), set-top boxes (STBs) and a range of other applications in the digital home and beyond.”
“So on the big-endian Wii, the two neighboring 16-bit pixels are swapped (see the last assignment to out_val).”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘big-endian’.
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Babble Tech
Go Babble! Words, if you can call them that, from the world of technology and computers. I'll try to make sure each one is represented by a Wordnik example.
cifsiostat, nfsiostat, mpstat, iostat, pidstat, sar, sysstat, cron, fetchmail, zypper, mysqldump, rsync and 102 more...
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kickassery
words that kick ass, in the non-literal sense
keraunophilia, vituperative, archnemesis, megafauna, Brontotherium, haruspex, vainglory, immanent, tarasque, aurochs, fraktur, photophore and 88 more...
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spicolli's Words
terrapin, ravenous, fuck, sepulchral, garlic, suss, queer, curmudgeon, foodie, intricate, omphalos, subversion and 534 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for big-endian.

hernesheir That said, little-endian and bi-endian are additional states of endianness. I looked it up. Jan 7, 2012