Meaning – The term little-endian, refers to a format for storage or transmission of binary data in which the least significant bit (or byte) is placed first.
Computers store data in memory in binary. One thing that is often overlooked is the formatting at the byte level of this data. This is called endianness and it refers to the ordering of the bytes.
Specifically, little-endian is when the least significant bytes are stored before the more significant bytes, and big-endian is when the most significant bytes are stored before the less significant bytes.
Example of usage – “All x86_64 processors (Intel/AMD) use little-endian while IP/TCP uses big-endian. This means that in order for you to use the Internet, your computer has to account for the difference in endianness.”
