Editing Round-off error (section)

=== IEEE standard ===

In the [[Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers|IEEE]] standard the base is binary, i.e. <math>\beta = 2</math>, and normalization is used. The IEEE standard stores the sign, exponent, and significand in separate fields of a floating point word, each of which has a fixed width (number of bits). The two most commonly used levels of precision for floating-point numbers are single precision and double precision. 
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:1em auto"
! Precision
! Sign (bits)
! Exponent (bits)
! Trailing Significand field (bits)
|-
|Single || 1 || 8 || 23 
|-
|Double || 1 || 11 || 52
|}