bite [OE] There are words related to bite in many other European languages. Their ancestor also gave us bit [OE] and *bitter, and it probably meant ‘to split, to cleave’. To bite the bullet now means ‘to face up to something unpleasant’. Its origin is said to be in battlefield surgery—that wounded soldiers would be given a bullet to bite on to prevent them from crying out when the pain became unbearable. However, there is no evidence that this ever happened, and surgeons always carried leather straps with them for this purpose. Another phrase involving biting something unusual is to bite the dust, ‘to be killed or come to an end’. Nowadays people are likely to associate it with Westerns and gunfights, but it is used by the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett in 1750, and similar expressions such as to bite the ground and bite the sand are found even earlier. Man bites dog is a much-used jokey newspaper headline, which harks back to the quote: ‘When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.’ This was said by the American journalist John B. Bogart (1848–1921).

The bit in computing, a unit of information expressed as either a 0 or 1, is a contraction of binary digit. Bit and bite were combined to give byte, a group of eight bits.