A stable group of eight electrons in the outer shell of an atom (as in an atom of a noble gas).
Chemistry
A stable group of eight electrons in the outer shell of an atom (as in an atom of a noble gas).
Computer
Eight contiguous bits; an eight bit byte. The term is used instead of byte to prevent confusion in cases where the term has pre-existing hardware associations, as in machines with 7-bit bytes, 9-bit bytes, 12-bit bytes.