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big-endian: "Multibyte data items are always stored in big-endian order, where the high bytes come first" [JVMSpec 122012], Chapter 4, "The class File Format". This term refers to the tension between Lilliput and Blefuscu (regarding whether to open soft-boiled eggs from the large or the small end) in Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels; it was first applied to the question of byte-ordering by Danny Cohen [Cohen 1981].
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volatile: "A write to a volatile field happens-before every subsequent read of that field" [JLS 2011] §17.4.5. "Happens-before Order". "Operations on the master copies of volatile variables on behalf of a thread are performed by the main memory in exactly the order that the thread requested" [JVMSpec 991999]. Accesses to a volatile variable are sequentially consistent, which also means that the operations are exempt from compiler optimizations. Declaring a variable volatile ensures that all threads see the most up-to-date value of the variable if any thread modifies it. Volatile guarantees atomic reads and writes of primitive values, but it does not guarantee the atomicity of composite operations such as variable incrementation (read-modify-write sequence).
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