swab /swob/ [From the mnemonic for the PDP-11 SWAp Byte instruction, as immortalized in the dd (1) option conv=swab (see dd )] 1. vt. To solve the NUXI problem by swapping bytes in a file 2. n. The program in V7 Unix used to perform this action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See also big-endian , little-endian , middle-endian , bytesexual.