Chunks

Chunks are units of data, information, or processing that are treated as a single entity. The concept appears across many disciplines to simplify handling of large or complex material by dividing it into manageable pieces. Chunks can be fixed in size or defined by the underlying content.

In linguistics and cognitive psychology, chunking refers to grouping elements into larger, meaningful units. This aids parsing and memory: listeners and readers segment language into phrases such as noun or verb phrases, and people store information by combining items into single representations, effectively increasing short-term memory capacity.

In computing, chunks are fundamental to storage, transmission, and processing. Files are often divided into chunks to enable parallel access, deduplication, and efficient transfer. Chunk size may be fixed or content-defined, with the latter adjusting boundaries to data patterns to improve efficiency and resilience to modification. HTTP supports chunked transfer encoding, where data are sent as a sequence of chunks with size prefixes, allowing streaming without a known total length in advance. Similar ideas underlie data backup, distributed storage, and content delivery networks.

In cryptography and data processing, data are processed in blocks or chunks of fixed size, with padding used to complete final blocks when necessary. In streaming media, video and audio are delivered in chunks to support buffering, adaptive bitrate, and smooth playback.

Overall, chunking is a general strategy for organizing information into coherent units, enabling scalable storage, faster processing, and more flexible transmission across many technical and cognitive contexts.