Endianess of architectures

From: Webopedia:

The adjectives big-endian and little-endian refer to which bytes are most significant in multi-byte data types and describe the order in which a sequence of bytes is stored in a computers memory.

The terms little-endian/big-endian is taken from an anectode from the novel Gulliver's travels. The Lilliputians were separated by those who broke their egg on the little end (becoming little-endians) and those who opened it on the big end (becoming big-endians).

Even though the above lists architectures either as little or big endian, some architectures are really endian-agnostic (or "bisexual"). They can be treated to act as a little or big endian CPU. PowerPC, MIPS and ARM are such CPUs. In these cases the above lists the endianess Debian uses for its GNU/Linux variant.

More information can be found here:

• Webopedia
• userchannel.de
• netrino.de
• datarescue.com
• MIPS architecture history