[bit] 
| 1. | a small piece or quantity of anything: a bit of string. |
| 2. | a short time: Wait a bit. |
| 3. | Informal. an amount equivalent to 12 1/2 U.S. cents (used only in even multiples): two bits; six bits. |
| 4. | an act, performance, or routine: She's doing the Camille bit, pretending to be near collapse. |
| 5. | a stereotypic or habitual set of behaviors, attitudes, or styles associated with an individual, role, situation, etc.: the whole Wall Street bit. |
| 6. | Also called bit part. a very small role, as in a play or motion picture, containing few or no lines. Compare walk-on (def. 1). |
| 7. | any small coin: a threepenny bit. |
| 8. | a Spanish or Mexican silver real worth 12 1/2 cents, formerly current in parts of the U.S. |
| 9. | a bit, rather or somewhat; a little: a bit sleepy. |
| 10. | a bit much, somewhat overdone or beyond tolerability. |
| 11. | bit by bit, by degrees; gradually: Having saved money bit by bit, they now had enough to buy the land. |
| 12. | do one's bit, to contribute one's share to an effort: They all did their bit during the war. |
| 13. | every bit, quite; just: every bit as good. |
| 14. | quite a bit, a fairly large amount: There's quite a bit of snow on the ground. |
| bit 1 (bĭt) n.
[Middle English bite, morsel, from Old English bita; see bheid- in Indo-European roots.] |
The smallest unit of information. One bit corresponds to a “yes” or “no.” Some examples of a bit of information: whether a light is on or off, whether a switch (like a transistor) is on or off, whether a grain of magnetized iron points up or down.
Note: The information in a digital computer is stored in the form of bits.
bit
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| bit (bĭt) Pronunciation Key
The smallest unit of computer memory. A bit holds one of two possible values, either of the binary digits 0 or 1. The term comes from the phrase binary digit. See Note at byte. |
bit by bit
Also, little by little. Gradually, by small degrees, slowly. For example, The squirrels dug up the lawn bit by bit, till we had almost no grass, or Little by little he began to understand what John was getting at. The first term was first recorded in 1849, although bit in the sense of "small amount" is much older; the variant dates from the 1400s.
