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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“Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)