AI engineering glossary · Computing foundations
What is endianness?
Endianness (also called Byte order): The order in which the bytes of a multi-byte number are stored in memory. Little-endian stores the least significant byte first, big-endian the most significant first, and mismatches matter when sharing binary data between systems.
Endianness: an example
The 32-bit number 1 is stored as 01 00 00 00 on a little-endian machine.
Related terms
More Computing foundations terms
- Event loop
- File descriptor
- File extension
- File system
- Firewall
- Firmware
- Floating-point number
- Garbage collection
Where you learn it
Endianness is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.