gigabyte

noun

Etymology: Etymology tree English giga- Proto-Indo-European *bʰeyd- Proto-Indo-European *bʰéydt Proto-Germanic *bītaną Proto-West Germanic *bītan Old English bītan Middle English biten English bite English byte English gigabyte From giga- + byte.

1. One billion (10⁹, or 1,000,000,000) bytes or 1,000 megabytes.

   “The IBM 3380 Direct Access Storage is a disk storage device with a storage capacity of 2.5 gigabytes (billion bytes) per unit, an increase of almost four times the capacity of the IBM 3350 Direct Access Storage.”

   “It does not take much effort these days to accumulate several hundred gigabytes of data. A few hundred songs, a couple of vacations’ worth of photos, a dozen movies and television programs — and suddenly the 80 gigabyte hard drive in the notebook computer is straining.”

2. A gibibyte.