Byte

Etymology

Coined by Werner Buchholz at IBM in 1956, deliberately spelled with a "y" so it could never be mistaken for "bit" in print or misread as a typo. It settled at eight bits because that was enough to represent one text character. Later "nibble" was jokingly coined for half a byte — four bits — extending the eating pun.

noun · /BITE/
A bundle of eight bits, the standard chunk of memory used to store a single character.
What it names
The practical unit everything is measured in — kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes — the reason storage and file sizes have a common yardstick.
Example
A plain text page is a few thousand bytes; a photo runs into millions.
Related idea
Byte is easily muddled with bit because network speeds are sold in bits per second while file sizes are in bytes — a 100-megabit connection downloads only about 12 megabytes each second.