Word for the Day Archive

Binary

Literally means consisting of two parts. A binary numbering system is made up entirely of only two values, usually zero (0) and one (1). This type of numbering system has been widely used in digital computers and other types of digital computing equipment over the years. The binary numbering system is easy to deploy electronically because the system only needs to differentiate two values — the 1 or the 0, which in the analog world can be represented by a ‘high’ voltage and a ‘low’ voltage. In a binary numbering system it can take many digits to represent our normal base 10 numbers. There are generally a fixed number of bits (8, 16, 24, etc.), which determine the size of the numbers that can be represented. The way it works is that each binary number as you move to the left represents a value double the number just to the right of it. A four bit binary number works as follows:

Bit 4: 8x
Bit 3: 4x
Bit 2: 2x
Bit 1: 1x

So, the 4 bit binary number:

0001 = 1;
0010 = 2;
0011 = 3;
0100 = 4;
0101 = 5;
0110 = 6;
0111 = 7;
1000 = 8;
1001 = 9, and so on.