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giga
Sign in to saveAlso known as G, giga prefix, giga SI prefix, G-, giga-
thumb|alt=Laptop-hard-drive-exposed|Laptop hard drive, with its platter exposed. Giga- ( or ) is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of a short-scale billion or long-scale milliard (109 or 1,000,000,000). It has the symbol G.
"Giga-" is a metric system prefix that means one billion (1,000,000,000), represented by the symbol G. It's commonly used in everyday technology to describe storage capacity and data sizes, such as when measuring gigabytes on computers or gigahertz in processor speeds.
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Encyclopedic overview
6 sectionsContents
- Pronunciation
- Common usage
- Binary prefix
- See also
- References
- External links
thumb|alt=Laptop-hard-drive-exposed|Laptop hard drive, with its platter exposed. Giga- ( or ) is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of a short-scale billion or long-scale milliard (109 or 1,000,000,000). It has the symbol G.
Giga- is derived from the Greek word (gígas), meaning "giant". The Oxford English Dictionary reports the earliest written use of giga in this sense to be in the Reports of the IUPAC 14th Conférence Internationale de Chimie in 1947: "The following prefixes to abbreviations for the names of units should be used: G giga 109×." However, it was already used in 1932 by the German organization Verband deutscher Elektrotechniker.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “giga” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.