Big-Endian
[ From Swift's Gulliver's Travels via the famous paper On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980 ]
adj. 1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric representation, the most significant byte has the lowest address (the word is stored 'big-end-first'). Most processors, including the IBM 370 family, the PDP-10, the Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs current in mid-1991, are big-endian.
See little-endian, middle-endian, NUXI problem.
2. An Internet address the wrong way around. Most
of the world follows the Internet standard and writes email
addresses starting with the name of the computer and ending up with
the name of the country. In the U.K. the Joint Networking Team had
decided to do it the other way around before the Internet domain
standard was established; e.g.,