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[Andrew Appel <appel AT princeton.edu>]

The English word "bit" was coined by Claude Shannon as an abbreviation of "binary digit".

The French word "bit" is a cognate of the English word.

The Frech word "mot" is a literal translation of the English word "word",

so you can translate "32-bit word" as "mot de 32 bits".

The word "byte" was coined by Werner Buchholz of IBM in New York.

But French computer science terminology uses the word "octet" instead of just using the English word "byte".

To see why, you can use your favorite translation app to translate "bite" from English to French.

I believe that was (in part) the joke of naming Coq as it is:  it's a perfectly acceptable word in French, it's a symbol of France itself, as well as a play on the name of an inventor (Coquand) and the abbreviation of the Calculus of Constructions (coc); and as a special bonus, it makes English speakers just as uncomfortable as the use of the word "byte" would make a French speaker.

By the way, the first computer I used had six-bit bytes.  You can translate that to French as "octets de six bits", which makes no sense at all!

-- Andrew Appel