Etymology of “byte”

The term byte implies a chunk of something — whenever I hear the word, I picture someone taking bite out of a sandwich. That chunk of sandwich is equivalent to the unit of digital information represented by a byte. To extend this metaphor, half a byte is called a nibble or nybble. I would imagine that nibbling a sandwich would result in a smaller amount of food than biting a sandwich.

We'll never know unless we hear from the man himself, but the following might be of interest:

Origins of the term "BYTE"

It was written by Bob Bemer who worked with Werner Buchholz at IBM.

I think the explanation is simply that Werner Buchholz came up with bite as a tongue-in-cheek collective noun for a group of bits, then changed the spelling to byte to avoid confusion.