bit

adj

Etymology: See bite. Replaced a former strong past tense, seen in Middle English bot and Old English bāt.

1. Having been bitten.

   “Even though he's bit, of course the zombies would still chase him.”

   “Fortunately, someone who gets skeeter-bit this much may develop an immunity to the skeeter's saliva”

name

1. An Austroasiatic language spoken in China and Laos.

noun

Etymology: Coined by John Tukey in 1946 as an abbreviation of binary digit, probably influenced by connotations of “small portion”. First used in print 1948 by Claude Shannon. Compare byte and nybble, with similar food associations.

1. A binary digit, generally represented as a 1 or 0.
2. The smallest unit of storage in a digital computer, consisting of a binary digit.
3. Any datum that may take on one of exactly two values.

   “status bits on IRC”

   “permission bits in a file system”

4. A unit of measure for information entropy.

   “The researchers found that the original texts spanned a variety of entropy values in different languages, reflecting differences in grammar and structure. But strangely, the difference in entropy between the original, ordered text and the randomly scrambled text was constant across languages. This difference is a way to measure the amount of information encoded in word order, Montemurro says. The amount of information lost when they scrambled the text was about 3.5 bits per word.”

5. A microbitcoin, or a millionth of a bitcoin (0.000001 BTC).

verb

Etymology: See bite. Replaced a former strong past tense, seen in Middle English bot and Old English bāt.

1. simple past of bite

   “Your dog bit me!”

2. past participle of bite, bitten

   “I've been bit by your dog!”