Definition of "bit"

The smallest coin we had in Canada in early days was a dime, worth ten cents. The Indians called this coin "a Bit". Our next coin, double in buying power and in size, was a twenty-five cent piece and this the Indians called "Two Bits".

1941, Emily Carr, chapter 10, in Klee Wyck‎

I trusted to the Lord to be with me; and at one of our trips to St. Eustatia, a Dutch island, I bought a glass tumbler with my half bit, and when I came to Montserrat I sold it for a bit, or sixpence.

1789, Olaudah Equiano, chapter 6, in The Interesting Narrative, volume I

He left after shaking her down for four bits for carrying the bags.

1966, Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, New York: Bantam Books, published 1976, page 16

‘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?’

1963, Margery Allingham, “The Beanspiller”, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, page 186

Not long ago, it was difficult to produce photographs of tiny creatures with every part in focus. […] A photo processing technique called focus stacking has changed that. Developed as a tool to electronically combine the sharpest bits of multiple digital images, focus stacking is a boon to biologists seeking full focus on a micron scale.

2013 July-August, Catherine Clabby, “Focus on Everything”, in American Scientist

My young companion was a bit of a poet.

T. Hook

Had it not been for the influence of Mrs. Booth and Hope Hall I should still be grafting or doing a bit in some stir

1904, The Anamosa prison press, volume 7, Iowa. Colony of Detention at Anamosa

Before doing that I am going to tell you what was the result of my own incarceration, because I presume it may not be a secret to you, that I have done a "bit" myself, not the "bit" which the prosecuting attorney was so anxious to have me do.

1916, Thomas Mott Osborne. Warden, Sing Sing Prison, N. Y., “Prison Reform”, in The Journal of sociologic medicine, volume 17, page 407

Chino didn't make me think of Dachau or that notorious joint in Angola, Louisiana, where a brother who had done a bit there told me how they used to cut the grass on the front lawn with their fingernails.

1994, Odie Hawkins, Lost Angeles, page 158

Not counting the days—that's okay for a county-time slap, but it'll make you crazy if you've got years to go on a felony bit.

2001, Andrew H. Vachss, Pain management

JIMMY: I need to get my hands on some bits. If you’re still in the business. RONNIE (played by Nick Nevern): Oi! TROJAN (played by Jean-Paul Van Cauwelaert): Ronnie. {…} TROJAN: Now that is a SIG Sauer P226.

2013 December 23, Stephen Reynolds, 46:53 from the start, in Stephen Reynolds, director, Vendetta (film), spoken by Jimmy Vickers (Danny Dyer)

Fortunately, someone who gets skeeter-bit this much may develop an immunity to the skeeter's saliva

1984 July, Field & Stream, volume 89, number 3, page 24

Only the year before, the conjure man had brought in the Jackson County madstone, from way over in Illinois, for a white peddler that had been dog-bit, and the man went ahead and died just the same

1992, Robert Lewis Taylor, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters‎

He will not — he'll tell you not to be loco, climbing up trees late at night when you'll get bug-bit to death plus you can't see anything

1998, Adele Griffin, Rainy Season‎, page 121

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.

2011 May 17, Lisa Grossman, “Entropy Is Universal Rule of Language”, in Wired Science‎, retrieved 2012-09-26