Endianness

In computing, endianness is the order or sequence of bytes of a word of digital data in computer memory. Endianness is primarily expressed as big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE). A big-endian system stores the most significant byte of a word at the smallest memory address and the least significant byte at the largest. A little-endian system, in contrast, stores the least-significant byte at the smallest address.[1][2][3] Bi-endianness is a feature supported by numerous computer architectures that feature switchable endianness in data fetches and stores or for instruction fetches. Other orderings are generically called middle-endian or mixed-endian.[4][5][6][7]

Endianness may also be used to describe the order in which the bits are transmitted over a communication channel^{[citation needed]}, e.g., big-endian in a communications channel transmits the most significant bits first.[8]^{[citation needed]} Bit-endianness is seldom used in other contexts.