0xtalk Speaking in Hexadecimal Source: Wikipedia Hexadecimal is such a useful representation. If for no other reason, Hex is awesome because every hex- digit (I can't stand the word nibble) expands into an integer number of bits, allowing it to faithfully represent binary based design decision. This is great when writing code or design docs, but its usefulness ends there. Unfortunately, there is no universally agreed upon way of speaking hex aloud and saying the digits one by one gets obnoxious for more than 4 hex-digits. Even if most of the digits are zeros, attempting to say 0xFF000000 as, "F F and 6 six zeros," could quickly turn into a, " who's on first? " situation. The alternative is to speak the numbers as decimal, but that often sacrifices the reason why a number was chosen in the first place. The number 0xF000 clearly has its upper 4 bits set, that's completely lost when stating the number as 61,440. It doesn't have to be this way.