Affixes

A floating-point operation in computing is a calculation carried out on two numbers whose format allows the binary equivalent of the decimal point to be moved about, or ‘float’. The speed of a computer can be measured by counting the rate at which it can do such calculations. The original form of this suffix was ‑flops, as in megaflops, gigaflops, or teraflops (see the entry Number words) but the final s (for second) was frequently taken to indicate a plural and is now often dropped.