Does bit (information) have a plural [closed]

Solution 1:

As any other unit of measurement, bit also has its plural form - bits.

20 bits of data is received.

The capacity of this medium is 200 bits.

Using the singular form in both sentences would be wrong. If you use just the single-digit version - b, you do not need to put the s at the end: 200b.

Maybe in some contexts, where each of the separate bits is not so important as the whole chunk of data itself, the singular form can still be used, but I cannot think of any good example right now.

Solution 2:

Bit when used as a unit of measurement is singular.

ASCII encodes 128 characters into 7-bit binary integers.

Otherwise it works like a normal noun, with singular and plural.

The client received 2,146, 567 bits of data from the server. About two million bits were received.

Here we flip the leading bit to zero.