Giga-

Pronunciation

In English, the prefix giga can be pronounced (a hard g as in giggle), or (a soft g as in gigantic, which shares giga Ancient Greek root). A prominent example of this latter pronunciation is found in the pronunciation of gigawatts in the 1985 film Back to the Future.

According to the American writer Kevin Self, a German committee member of the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed giga as a prefix for 109 in the 1920s, drawing on a verse (evidently "Anto-logie") by the German humorous poet Christian Morgenstern that appeared in the third (1908) edition of his Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs). This suggests that a hard German was originally intended as the pronunciation. Self was unable to ascertain when the (soft g) pronunciation came into occasional use, but claimed that as of 1995 it had returned to (hard g).

In 1998, a poll by the phonetician John C. Wells found that 84% of Britons preferred the pronunciation of gigabyte starting with (as in gig), 9% with (as in jig), 6% with (guy), and 1% with (as in giant).

Common usage

• gigahertz—clock rate of a CPU, for instance, 3 GHz =
• gigabit—bandwidth of a network link, for instance, 1 Gbit/s = .
• gigabyte—for instance, for hard disk capacity, 120 GB = ;
• gigayear or gigaannum—one billion (109) years, sometimes abbreviated Gyr, but the preferred usage is Ga or, for years ago, GA.

Binary prefix

The notation represents 1,000,000,000 bytes or, in deprecated usage, 1,073,741,824 (230) bytes. Per IEC 60027-2 A.2 and ISO/IEC 80000 standards, the correct notation of 230 is gibi (symbol Gi). One gibibyte () is 1,073,741,824 bytes or approximately . Despite international standards, the use of = 230 B is widespread. A laptop advertised as having has 8,589,934,592 bytes of memory: , or .

References

References

1. (October 2011). "giga-, comb. form".
2. "Wireless Engineer, 1932, issue 05, p. 252.".
3. [http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/pdf/sp811.pdf NIST Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (Appendix D. ref 5)]
4. "SI prefixes and their etymologies".
5. (1917). "{{lang". Bruno Cassirer.
6. (1963). "Gallows Songs: Christian Morgenstern's "Galgenlieder", Bilingual Edition: A Selection". University of California Press.
7. (October 1994). "Technically speaking". [[IEEE]].
8. (April 1995). "Technically speaking". [[IEEE]].
9. Wells, J. C. (1998). ''[http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/poll98.htm LPD pronunciation preference poll 1998]''.
10. Wilcock, Bruce. (July 1967). "Megayear and Gigayear". Nature.
11. "Definitions of the SI units: The binary prefixes".
12. "GB Vs GiB: What’s The Difference? - MASV".