Nickle
/ni-kəl/
noun — “the awkward little five-bit quantity that exists mostly because hardware occasionally gets creative.”
[from nickel, the common name for the U.S. five-cent coin]
Nickel is hacker jargon for a data quantity equal to a nybble plus one additional bit—that is, 5 bits. While not a standardized computing unit and rarely encountered in modern systems, the term emerged as playful technical slang for describing unusual hardware word sizes that did not align neatly with familiar binary boundaries.
Deckle
/dek'l/
noun — “two nickels pretending to be a word size.”
[from dec- and nickle]
Deckle is hacker jargon for a quantity of 10 bits, formed by combining two nickles (where a nickle represents 5 bits). Like its smaller relative, the term emerged not from formal standards but from developers trying to describe unusual hardware layouts that did not fit neatly into the byte-oriented vocabulary that later became dominant.