The IPA transcription is somewhat suspicious, especially as "The word was coined by mutating the word ‘bite’ so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit."

The IPA transcription is somewhat suspicious, especially as "The word was coined by mutating the word ‘bite’ so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit." (ibid) I'm pretty sure that mutating [bait] to [bi:t] is somewhat complicated; also, e.g. Wiktionary lists the pronunciation as [bait]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/byte http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/byte Moreover, "correct" is rather subjective (and malleable in time), especially where English is concerned: "gay" once meant "merry," and "meme" didn't always mean "cat pictures subtitled with Impact"; does that mean the current usage is incorrect? That's not to mention the pronunciation of "tomato," etc. (cue linguistic flamewar)