megabyte
Pluralmegabytes
- 1A unit of digital information equal to one million bytes (1,000,000), or one thousand kilobytes.
Roughly the amount of plain text in a short paperback novel.
Each high-resolution image from the camera occupies roughly five megabytes.
A single megabyte can hold about a minute of compressed audio.
Note
This is the decimal reckoning and the formal one: mega- plus byte, with the prefix meaning "million" exactly as it does in other SI units. IBM's System/360 System Summary (1964) already rates a drum at 1.2 megabytes per second. Today it is the unit that data plans bill by, as in "ten cents per megabyte" over the limit. Where precision matters, keep it distinct from the binary megabyte, properly called a mebibyte.
- 2A unit of digital information equal to 1,048,576 bytes (2²⁰), the binary value often meant in informal computing usage.
Like a 'baker's dozen': the familiar name actually stands for a slightly larger amount.
Memory chips come in powers of two, so each megabyte holds 1,048,576 bytes.
The operating system reported the file as four megabytes, counting 1,048,576 bytes per unit.
Similarmebibyte
Note
The informal, binary megabyte stretches mega- to fit powers of two. Michael Meyers's Managing and Troubleshooting PCs (2003) states the trap plainly: a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, yet a megahertz is a flat million hertz. Careful writers add the exact count, as in "5 megabytes (5,242,880 bytes)," to show which unit they mean. Mebibyte is the unambiguous name, and the decimal megabyte is the formal one.
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Origin
Formed from the prefix "mega-" combined with "byte".