January 25, 2026
Sometime around 1948, the American mathematician John Wilder Tukey (born 1915) realized that the words binary digit were likely to assume a much greater importance in the years ahead as computers became more prevalent. He decided to coin a new, shorter word to replace the unwieldy five syllables of binary digit. He considered bigit and binit but settled instead on the short, simple, elegant, and perfectly lovely word bit.
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