endianness
nounUK /ˈɛndiənnəs/
US /ˈɛndiənnəs/
The order in which a computer stores the bytes of a number.
The two computers could not share files because they used different endianness.
OTHER MEANINGS
2. The quality of belonging to a particular endian system or group.
The debate over the endianness of the new chip divided the engineers.
3. In networking, the convention for transmitting the most significant byte first.
Network protocols often specify big-endian endianness for headers.
4. A property of data formats that determines how multi-byte values are interpreted.
The file format documentation describes its endianness in detail.