What Does Big-Endian Mean?
Big-endian refers to the way that data is sequentially stored in computer memory. Just as in books or magazines, where the first word appears in the top-left-hand corner of each page, the data in a big-endian system is organized such that the most significant digits or bytes appear in the upper left corner of a memory page, while the least significant ones appear in the bottom right-hand corner. This is in contrast to little-endian systems, in which the least significant data is organized in the upper left corner, while the most important bytes appear bottom-right. Both systems refer to a computer systems’ “endianness,” or how bytes are arranged for that particular system.
