Nibble

ComputingTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Four bits, or half a byte. One hexadecimal digit.

1 nibble = 0.5 bytes (exactly).

1 nibble = 0.5 bytes

About the nibble

Computing slang supplied this name: if a byte is a bite, half of one is a nibble. Wikipedia reports that David B. Benson, a professor at Washington State University, may have coined it as a joke in 1958, and that the spelling nybble, echoing byte, appeared in computing magazines in the early 1980s. Other names for the same thing include half-byte, tetrad, quadbit and semi-octet.

A nibble is four bits, enough to hold one of 16 values, which is exactly one hexadecimal digit. That is why a byte of eight bits is written as two hex digits. IBM mainframes used nibbles in packed decimal, storing one decimal digit per nibble with the last one reserved for the sign, and early four-bit microprocessors and calculators worked on nibble-sized words.

It is a binary count, not a decimal or SI unit. The figure used here is 0.5 byte, or 4 bits.

Sources: Wikipedia: Nibble; Wikipedia: Byte

Nibble conversion chart

1 nibble expressed in every other digital storage unit:

Unit1 nibble
Bytes0.5
Kilobytes0.0005
Megabytes5×10⁻⁷
Gigabytes5×10⁻¹⁰
Terabytes5×10⁻¹³
Bits4
Petabytes5×10⁻¹⁶
Kibibytes0.00048828125
Mebibytes4.768371582×10⁻⁷
Gibibytes4.656612873×10⁻¹⁰
Tebibytes4.547473509×10⁻¹³
Kilobits0.004
Megabits0.000004
Gigabits4×10⁻⁹
Exabytes5×10⁻¹⁹
Zettabytes5×10⁻²²
Yottabytes5×10⁻²⁵
Pebibytes4.440892099×10⁻¹⁶
Exbibytes4.33680869×10⁻¹⁹
Terabits4×10⁻¹²
Kibibits0.00390625
Mebibits0.000003814697266
Gibibits3.725290298×10⁻⁹

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