Why is it that big endian puts the MSB at the smaller address and little endian puts the MSD at the bigger?

Question

It seems like the qualifiers big and little have been created purposely to confuse people. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Yes
Partly because you are crossing systems if you have typed accurately (MSB is most significant Byte, MSD is Most Significant Digit) and partly because you are wrong in your definition.
Citing the ever present Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness
> increasing numeric significance with increasing memory addresses, known as little-endian, and
its opposite, called big-endian.[2]
Again, big-endian does not mean "ending big", but "big end first".<
The choices were made when machine code was written and the processor makers made choices about how numbers were stored to increase processing speed. If the little end (smaller magnitudes) are stored first, then when adding the digits line up for addition and carry, with a positive step going to the next digit(s), the step being automatic on some processors.

Answer 2

BiG endian is a storage scheme in which the most significant unit of data or an address is stored at the lowest memory address. The little-Endian approach stores the least significant unit at the lowest address.

Assigning the highest address to the least significant byte in a word stored in memory.
For example, in a 32-bit, or four-byte word in memory:
the most significant byte would be assigned address i, and the subsequent bytes would be assigned the addresses: i + 1, i + 2, and i + 3. Thus, the least significant byte would have the highest address of i + 3 in a computer implementing the big endian address assignment.

Yes of course it's confusing. lol. Math and engineers invited this stuff.....

Answer 3

It doesn't confuse me when I think of lower addresses being "to the left" and larger addresses being "to the right". In this visualization, Big Endian puts the MSB first and Little Endian puts the MSB second (meaning the LSB or little byte is first)

Answer 4

good question