Endianness

Endian and endianness (or “byte-order”) describe how computers organize the bytes that make up numbers.

Each memory storage location has an index or address. Every byte can store an 8-bit number (i.e., between 0x00 and 0xff), so you must reserve more than one byte to store a larger number. By far the most common ordering of multiple bytes in one number is the little-endian, which is used on all Intel processors. Little-endian means storing bytes in order of least-to-most-significant (where the least significant byte takes the first or lowest address), comparable to a common European way of writing dates (e.g., 31 December 2050).