Kilobyte
noun, slang ·3 syllables ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 One thousand (10³, or 1,000) bytes. especially
"The data word processor 606 handles the in-flow and out-flow of byte-oriented input/output data and interleaved signals at a rate of, for example, 500 kilobytes per second. Instruction processing rates of four to eight per microsecond are required for such a data flow."
- 2 a unit of information equal to 1024 bytes wordnet
- 3 A kibibyte. informal
"It is assumed herein that each block includes 32 bytes, each sector includes 1 kilobyte, the buffer memory 116 includes 4 kilobytes, and read data is represented by one double word or 64 bits, as one word in this case consists of 32 bits."
- 4 a unit of information equal to 1000 bytes wordnet
Example
More examples"There has been a lot of disagreement about exactly how many bytes are in a kilobyte."
Etymology
Coined in the 1960s, from kilo- (“thousand”) + byte.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.