Noun

(en noun)

A piece of metal placed in a horse's mouth and connected to reins to direct the animal.

A rotary cutting tool fitted to a drill, used to bore holes.

(dated, British) A coin of a specified value. (Also used for a nine-pence coin in the British Caribbean)

(US) An eighth of a dollar. Note that there is no coin minted worth 12.5 cents. (When this term first came into use, the Spanish 8 reales coin was widely used as a dollar equivalent, and thus the 1 real coin was equivalent to 12.5 cents.)

(historical, US) In the southern and southwestern states, a small silver coin (such as the real) formerly current; commonly, one worth about 12½ cents; also, the sum of 12½ cents.

A small amount of something.

* {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), title=(The China Governess)

, chapter=15 citation , passage=‘No,’ said Luke, grinning at her. ‘You're not dull enough! […] What about the kid's clothes? I don't suppose they were anything to write home about, but didn't you keep anything? A bootee or a bit of embroidery or anything at all?’}}

(informal) Specifically , a small amount of time.

A portion of something.

* {{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=July-August, author= Catherine Clabby

, magazine=(American Scientist), title= Focus on Everything , passage=Not long ago, it was difficult to produce photographs of tiny creatures with every part in focus.

Somewhat; something, but not very great; also used like jot and whit to express the smallest degree.

Am I bored? Not a bit of it!

* T. Hook

My young companion was a bit of a poet.

(slang) A prison sentence, especially a short one.

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(An excerpt of material) An excerpt of material making up part of a show, comedy routine, etc.

The part of a key which enters the lock and acts upon the bolt and tumblers.

(Knight)

The cutting iron of a plane.

(Knight)

Noun

(en noun)

(mathematics, computing) A binary digit, generally represented as a 1 or 0.

(computing) The smallest unit of storage in a digital computer, consisting of a binary digit.

(information theory, cryptography) Any datum that may take on one of exactly two values.

status bits''' on IRC; permission '''bits in a file system

(information theory) A unit of measure for information entropy.

* {{quote-web, date = 2011-05-17

, author = Lisa Grossman , title = Entropy Is Universal Rule of Language , site = Wired Science , url = http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/universal-entropy/ , accessdate = 2012-09-26}}

The researchers found that the original texts spanned a variety of entropy values in different languages, reflecting differences in grammar and structure.
But strangely, the difference in entropy between the original, ordered text and the randomly scrambled text was constant across languages. This difference is a way to measure the amount of information encoded in word order, Montemurro says. The amount of information lost when they scrambled the text was about 3.5 bits per word.

Noun

(en noun)

An act of tracing.

A mark left as a sign of passage of a person or animal.

A very small amount.

* {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), title=(The China Governess)

, chapter=7 citation , passage=The highway to the East Coast which ran through the borough of Ebbfield had always been a main road and even now, despite the vast garages, the pylons and the gaily painted factory glasshouses which had sprung up beside it, there still remained an occasional trace of past cultures.}}

(electronics) An electric current-carrying conductive pathway on a printed circuit board.

An informal road or prominent path in an arid area.

One of two straps, chains, or ropes of a harness, extending from the collar or breastplate to a whippletree attached to a vehicle or thing to be drawn; a tug.

(fortification) The ground plan of a work or works.

The intersection of a plane of projection, or an original plane, with a coordinate plane.

(mathematics) The sum of the diagonal elements of a square matrix.