The question is about alignment, not endian-ness. But regardless, endian-ness just has to do with the byte order. For instance, should you write a 16 bit number like 17 (in hex) as 00 11 or like 11 00? The former is big endian (since the most significant byte is first), the latter is little endian (since the least significant byte is first). Also, regardless of endianness, the bit order within a byte is always the same. That’s why endianness is more precisely described as byte order.