binary digit (portmanteau)

In 1947, John Tukey at Princeton was working on early computing machines. Information in these machines was stored as zeros and ones—binary. The smallest unit was a single zero or one. Tukey needed a word for it. He combined binary + digit = binit, initially.

Tukey hated 'binit.' It sounded ugly. He tested 'bigit.' Worse. In a memo dated July 9, 1947, he proposed using the already-existing word 'bit'—which had meant a small piece of something for centuries. Bit, from Old English bita 'a bite,' suddenly meant the fundamental unit of digital information.

The Bell Telephone Laboratories adopted Tukey's term immediately. By the 1950s, bit was the standard word across computer science. Eight bits made a byte. Kilobits per second measured modem speed. The entire language of digital information grew from Tukey's distaste for 'binit.'

Now bit is the foundation of all digital communication. Your voice is millions of bits transmitted as electrical pulses. Your DNA could be encoded in bits. The word is older than computers by centuries—it meant 'a small piece'—but Tukey reanimated it for the digital age.