Other Meanings
Some authors extend the usage of the word "endianness", and of related terms, to entities such as street addresses, date formats and others. Such usages—basically reducing endianness to a mere synonym of ordering of the parts—are non-standard usage (e.g., ISO 8601:2004 talks about "descending order year-month-day", not about "big-endian format"), do not have widespread usage, and are generally (other than for date formats) employed in a metaphorical sense.
"Endianness" is sometimes used to describe the order of the components of a domain name, e.g. 'en.wikipedia.org' (the usual modern 'little-endian' form) versus the reverse-DNS 'org.wikipedia.en' ('big-endian', used for naming components, packages, or types in computer systems, for example Java packages, Macintosh ".plist" files, etc.). URLs can be considered 'big-endian', even though the host part could be a 'little-endian' DNS name.
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Famous quotes containing the word meanings:
“Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy.” “Lithe” is the same as “active.” You see, it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“An amoeba is a formless thing which takes many shapes. It moves by thrusting out an arm, and flowing into the arm. It multiplies by pulling itself in two, without permanently diminishing the original. So with words. A meaning may develop on the periphery of the body of meanings associated with a word, and shortly this tentacle-meaning has grown to such proportions that it dwarfs all other meanings.”
—Charlton Laird (b. 1901)