The term bit has a remarkably clean and deliberate origin story. It wasn’t a word that evolved naturally over centuries; it was actively invented in the 1940s to solve a branding problem for a brand-new scientific concept.
It is a portmanteau (a blend of two words) of binary digit.
Here is how it came to be, featuring two pioneers of information theory.
While most people associate the word with computer science titan Claude Shannon, the word was actually coined by an American statistician named John Tukey.
In 1947, Tukey was working at Bell Labs. Scientists there were starting to build early digital computers and calculate probabilities using binary numbers (1s and 0s). Tukey grew tired of constantly saying and writing the clunky phrase "binary digit."
He wanted something short and punchy. In a memo he proposed keeping the start of "binary" and the end of "digit" to form "bit."
The word might have died in a Bell Labs memo if it weren't for Claude Shannon, the brilliant mathematician known as the "Father of Information Theory."
In 1948, Shannon published a groundbreaking paper titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." This paper essentially founded modern digital communication. In the very first pages of his paper, Shannon needed a way to measure the smallest possible unit of information.
In the introduction, he explicitly credits Tukey:
"The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey."
Because Shannon's paper became the bible of the digital age, the word "bit" instantly became the global standard.