A megabyte is a unit for measuring how much digital information something holds or how much space a file takes up on a computer. One megabyte equals roughly one million bytes (the basic unit of computer storage), which is enough to store about 500 pages of plain text or a medium-quality photograph.

You encounter megabytes constantly when using technology. A song you download might be 3 or 4 megabytes. A short video could be 50 megabytes. When your tablet says an app needs 200 megabytes of space, it's telling you how much room that app will take up.

The abbreviation is MB. Megabytes sit in the middle of the measurement scale: smaller than gigabytes (1,000 megabytes equals one gigabyte) but much larger than kilobytes. Understanding megabytes helps you manage your devices: you'll know whether you have enough space to download that game, or why your email won't send a video that’s too large.