Meaning of Nibble | Babel Free

Definitions

1. An act of taking a small, quick bite, or several of such bites, especially with the front teeth; the bite or bites so taken.
2. A unit of memory equal to half a byte, or chiefly four bits.
3. A light bite of a person or animal, or part of their body, especially one which is loving or playful; a nip.
4. An amount of food that is or can be taken into the mouth through a small bite; a small mouthful.
5. A slight show of interest in something, such as a commercial opportunity or a proposal.
   figuratively
6. Grass or other vegetation eaten by livestock; forage, pasturage.
   obsolete, rare

Equivalents

Examples

“[H]e would sit on a wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar's lance, and fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble.”

“Yo'r sheep will be a' folded, a reckon, Measter Pratt, for there'll ne'er be a nibble o' grass to be seen this two month, according to my reading; […]”

“On the northern slopes of the light-earthed hills the moss had come over the herbage, and the sweet nibble of the sheep was souring.”

“I own several abaci and two books on how to use them, but they all have four counters below the bar and one counter above it. […] The bottom four counters of each abacus can be used to represent a "nybble," and the upper counter on each can be used for parity.”

“At every negative-going transition it reads a 4-bit ADPCM nybble (there are 2 nybbles per byte) and stores it in a memory-resident table.”

“Data is being received by a system in serial sequences of four bit nybbles. (A nybble is usually defined as a four bit grouping.) […] Our mission, should we decide to accept it, is to test each nybble and determine whether or not the four bits constitute a valid BCD (8421) number.”

“Each pixel has an integer gray scale value associated with it to indicate its shade of gray. […] Gray scale values can be stored in either 4 bits (nibble) or 8 bits (byte).”

“That is, the lower nibble (the 4 bits 1010 = A) has been masked to zero.”

“Similarly, it's easy to convert a binary number such as %1100011010110010 into its hexadecimal equivalent. All we have to do is to split the binary value into 4-bit nybbles and to map each nybble onto its corresponding hexadecimal digit.”

“A nibble is a collection of four bits. It wouldn't be a particularly interesting data structure except for two items: BCD (binary coded decimal) numbers and hexadecimal numbers. It takes four bits to represent a single BCD or hexadecimal digit. With a nibble, one can represent up to 16 distinct values. […] [H]exadecimal and BCD digits are the primary items we can represent with a single nibble.”

“Each half [of a byte], a group of four consecutive bits, called a semibyte or nibble, is represented by a unique hexadecimal digit; for instance: 00101101 = 0x2D. The high nibble contains the most-significant four bits: 0010 = 0x2. The low nibble contains the least-significant four bits: 1101 = 0xD.”

CEFR level