Gigabyte is a unit of digital information storage equivalent to 1 billion bytes. While it sounds impressive, gigabytes are increasingly pedestrian in an era of terabyte hard drives and petabyte data warehouses.

How to use it in a sentence

"I can't believe marketing expects me to write a whole dictionary entry on gigabytes when I have a critical pull request to review for our new microservices architecture on Kubernetes!" the senior engineer grumbled. "Sure, I'll explain how many MP3s or 4K videos you can store in a gigabyte, but I'd rather be optimizing our distributed caching layer on Redis."

If you actually want to learn more...

• Gigabyte - Wikipedia: Get the full scoop on gigabytes, including their history, how they relate to other units like gibibytes, and riveting details on metric prefixes. Warning: may cause drowsiness in those who actually ship code.

• Understanding Gigabytes, Terabytes & Petabytes with Real Life Examples: If you really want to bore your fellow engineers, memorize these examples of how many photos, songs, or DNA base pairs fit in different storage units. Guaranteed to make their eyes glaze over faster than a day-long sprint planning session.

• Powers of 10: How Big is a Gigabyte?: For those who prefer pretty moving pictures to words, here's a video explaining gigabytes and other storage sizes. Perfect for sharing with the product manager who can't understand why you need more than a gigabyte of RAM to run that "simple" machine learning model.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.