megabyte

noun

mega·​byte ˈme-gə-ˌbīt 

: 1024 kilobytes or 1,048,576 bytes

also : one million bytes

Examples of megabyte in a Sentence

The CD has a storage capacity of 800 megabytes.

Recent Examples on the Web

The only down side is the file size; fully uncompressed RAW files from this sensor run around 125 megabytes per image, though there are compressed options that will get them down to about 80 MP per image. —Boutayna Chokrane, WIRED, 3 Dec. 2024

Google added a faster and more energy efficient processor and upped the RAM to 16 megabytes. —Larry Magid, The Mercury News, 7 Nov. 2024

That means Starlink can deliver download bandwidth in the hundreds of megabytes and, crucially, latency right down into the tens of milliseconds, rather than the half-second or more that geostationary satellites suffer from. —Barry Collins, Forbes, 22 Oct. 2024

Servers and workstations need a lot of computing power, making having as many cores as possible necessary—far more critical than a few extra megabytes of L3 cache. —Michael Justin Allen Sexton, PCMAG, 24 July 2024

Word History

Etymology

from the fact that 1,048,576 (2²⁰) is the power of 2 closest to one million

First Known Use

1965, in the meaning defined above

Kids Definition

megabyte

noun

mega·​byte ˈmeg-ə-ˌbīt 

: 1,048,576 bytes

also : one million bytes