Megabyte
/ˈmɛɡəˌbaɪt/noun
A unit of digital information equal to 1,000,000 bytes in decimal usage or 1,048,576 bytes in binary usage.
Did you know?Megabyte is a modern technical coinage, but its first element comes from Greek megas, the same root behind words like megaphone and megastar—so even your storage space wears a word of ancient magnitude.
Etymological Timeline
Ancient Greek
Greek
megas
“great, large, mighty”
19th Century
English
mega-
“a prefix meaning one million, later also used informally for very large”
19th Century
English
byte
“a unit of digital information (originally coined in computing)”
1950s-1960s
English
megabyte
“a million-byte unit of computer data storage or memory”
Modern English
English
megabyte
“a standard data unit used in computing and digital storage”