Definition of "octet" []

• Music A composition for eight voices or eight instruments. (noun)
• Music A group of eight singers or eight instrumentalists. (noun)
• A group of eight: "A train of heavy wagons rumbled north on the Winnipeg Trail, drawn by octets of oxen” ( Garrison Keillor). (noun)
• See octave. (noun)
• A set of eight valence electrons in an atom or ion, forming a stable configuration. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "For example, you might want to subnet an address like 10. 1.x.0, where the first two octets are fixed because they are used in the extended network prefix, and the fourth octet is 0 because all bits are used for the host number."
• "Yet another one of Gordon Brown's 'octet' - the eight advisers named in The Spectator three years ago - is moving on."
• "As a 16-year-old, Mendelssohn wrote the featured octet, which is considered to be one of his masterpieces, she said."