Nybbles

Nybbles are a unit of digital information equal to four bits. With four bits, a nybble can represent 16 distinct values, typically 0 through 15. In practice, nybbles are most commonly used to express hexadecimal digits, since one nybble corresponds to a single hex digit.

Name and spellings often vary. The concept is also called a nibble, and both “nybble/nybbles” and “nibble/nibbles” appear in technical literature. The term likely arose informally in the early days of computing to describe half of a byte. Today, nibble is the more widely used spelling in many contexts, but nybble and its plural nybbles remain common in some communities and documentation.

Technical usage and relationships. A nybble is one-quarter of a byte and two nybbles make up one byte. This four-bit unit is convenient for representing hex-encoded data, as each hex digit maps directly to a single nybble. Nybbles also appear in certain numerical representations and low-level data processing tasks, such as nibble extraction, nibble swapping, or nibble-oriented formatting.

Historical context. Early computer architectures sometimes emphasized nibble-sized operations before byte-oriented designs became dominant. Although modern systems typically use 8-bit bytes, the nybble remains a useful mental model and a practical unit when dealing with hexadecimal data, memory dumps, color codes, and certain digital communication formats.