Endianness

Endianness refers to the order of the bytes, comprising a digital word, in computer memory. It also describes the order of byte transmission over a digital link. Words may be represented in big-endian or little-endian format. With big-endian the most significant byte of a word is stored at a particular memory address and the subsequent bytes are stored in the following higher memory addresses, the least significant byte thus being stored at the highest memory address. Little-endian format reverses the order and stores the least significant byte at the lower memory address with the most significant byte being stored at the highest memory address.