>I prefer bytes over octets because it's one <mumble> shorter. Your intuition is right on the money, although perhaps you didn't conciously realize why you were leaning that way. Actually, you see, "bytes" is really *way* shorter than "octets". I'm not talking typing, either--but if I were, I should point out that the letters "ctets" are typed all under the left hand, which results in something more than a tad unpleasant to type. No, I'm talking about *sounds*, here. If you look at "bytes", you get something like /baIts/ phonemically (please see footnote), which as goes from closed to open to closed {COC} again, and that's it. You could even argue that the /aI/ counts as one phoneme and thus takes lets cognitive space. Heck, in some places of the world, so does /ts/. Certainty in the American South, you're apt to hear utterances that would phonetically be [bha?s] or [bha:s], losing the /t/ -> [?] in normal speech, and the /aI/ manifesting as [a] or a drawn-out (drawled out? :-) [a:]. The [h] is an aspiration, the [?] is the swallowed "t". Now compare this with "octets". Using the brace notation above, we end up with an open-close sequence {OCCOC}, which is much harder. But your mouth is a three-dimensional object, not two, so you also have a front-back alternation between the "ct" pair to contend with. Your poor mouth has all kinds of transitions to make, across several different axes. This is not a lot of fun, which is why it always gets worn down over the course of time; consider what happen to Latin "octo-" in modern Romance tongues, or even how differently English now pronounces German "knecht" when we say "knight". The word "octets" looks like /Ok 'tE?s/ phonemically, which is full of painfully clumsy post-positive aspirations in its common phonetic manifestations. It ends up being more like [Okh 'thets], because there's a glaring [h] aspiration between the /kt/ boundary, at least, and then probably another one again after the first "t". Yes, the second "t" got swallowed a bit into [?], as it did with "bytes". The word also has something of an uncommon stress for a two-syllable English noun, falling as it does on the last syllable instead of the penult. And really, "octets" is, all in all, a terribly uptight word, one whose crisp articulation doesn't lend itself to a relaxed pronunciation. Well, at least, not to one permissible in polite company: I'm not sure ['Akh tIts] is something you want your children reproducing, eh? Sounds like something the early explorers might have said when they named Grands Tetons National Park. :-) In short, yes, you were exceedingly right--and for many interesting underlying reasons--when you said "bytes" was shorter than "octets". --tom FOOTNOTE: See http://homepages.tcp.co.uk/~laker/ipa/ for decoding.