big-endian: [From Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" via the famous paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen,

:big-endian: [From Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" via the famous
paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen,
USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980] adj. 1. Describes a computer
architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric
representation, the most significant byte has the lowest address
(the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most processors,
including the IBM 370 family, the {PDP-10}, the Motorola
microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs
current in mid-1993, are big-endian. See {little-endian},
{middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}, {swab}. 2. An
{{Internet address}} the wrong way round. Most of the world
follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting
with the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the
country. In the U.K. the Joint Networking Team had decided to do
it the other way round before the Internet domain standard was
established; e.g., me@uk.ac.wigan.cs. Most gateway sites have
{ad-hockery} in their mailers to handle this, but can still be
confused. In particular, the address above could be in the
U.K. (domain uk) or Czechoslovakia (domain cs).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary