kilobyte

noun

ki·lo·byte ˈki-lə-ˌbīt

ˈkē-lə-

: a unit of computer information equal to 1024 bytes

also : one thousand bytes

Did you know?

Knowing the root kilo-, you might think a kilobyte would be exactly 1,000 bytes. But actually a kilobyte represents the power of 2 that comes closest to 1,000: that is, 210 (2 to the 10th power), or 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2, or 1,024. Why 2? Because the capacity of memory chips is always based on powers of 2. Locations in electronic memory circuits are identified by binary numbers (numbers that use only the digits 0 and 1), so the number of addressable locations becomes a power of 2.

Example Sentences

Recent Examples on the Web The web app for Starbucks, for example, takes up just 429 kilobytes of storage on my phone — or less than 1 percent of the storage taken by the standard Starbucks Android app. —

Shira Ovide, Washington Post, 30 May 2023 That work represented about one kilobyte's worth of data. —

Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics, 25 July 2020 On the building's surface, the 1,024 panels, representing a kilobyte of data, were cut with Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines. —

Nicola Chilton, CNN, 20 June 2022 For a 523 kilobyte image file hosted by Twitter, researchers determined that the amount of data that could be downloaded decreased by more than 87% compared with an image hosted elsewhere, closely resembling a 2G connection. —

New York Times, 23 Oct. 2021 The program weighed in at two kilobytes, four times the size of Mark Lesser’s 511-byte handheld games, and was much more complex. —

David L. Craddock, Ars Technica, 14 Sep. 2019 Facebook's popular open source React library for building user interfaces, for example, weighs in at 100 kilobytes. —

Klint Finley, Wired, 4 Apr. 2020 In total, 28 days of data can be stored in the app in under 100 kilobytes of space (that's less storage space than a single photo takes up). —

Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics, 18 Mar. 2020 Images can be compressed into a few kilobytes versus a video that plays at 25 frames per second. —

Bryan Borzykowski, Washington Post, 10 Feb. 2020 See More

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'kilobyte.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.