2byte

2byte is a term used in computing to refer to data units consisting of two bytes (16 bits). The expression appears in technical documentation, programming, and discussions of data formats where the size of a value or field is measured in bytes.

In numeric data, a 2-byte quantity can be stored as an unsigned or signed integer. Depending on endianness, the byte order differs on little- and big-endian machines. Common ranges include 0–65535 for unsigned and −32768 to 32767 for signed. 2-byte values appear in network ports, file headers, and protocol fields.

In text encoding, a 2-byte unit is used by several character encodings. UTF-16 encodes most common characters in two-byte code units, with some characters represented by surrogate pairs using four bytes. Other legacy encodings, such as certain East Asian schemes, also rely on fixed 2-byte code units.

The term is sometimes encountered as 2-byte or 2-bytes, and in casual use may appear as 2byte or "2byte" as a brand name or product label. When encountered as a proper noun, its meaning depends on context and is not standardized.

Related topics include endianness, 16-bit data types, and 16-bit character encodings.