significand
Noun
Meaning
significand (plural significands)
The part of a floating-point number that contains its significant digits.
Synonyms: mantissa, coefficient, argument, fraction
Coordinate term: exponent
Examples
A number is, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits (the significand ) and scaled using an exponent in some fixed base; the base for the scaling is normally two, ten, or sixteen.
Explicitly, ignoring significand, taking the reciprocal is just taking the additive inverse of the (unbiased) exponent, since the exponent of the reciprocal is the negative of the original exponent.
Here, s denotes the significand and e denotes the exponent.
In practice, the most significant bit of the significand field determined whether a NaN is signaling or quiet.
In the case of a tie, the value that would make the significand end in an even digit is chosen.
In the IEEE binary interchange formats the leading 1 bit of a normalized significand is not actually stored in the computer datum.