(also known as misaligned) An address is unaligned or misaligned if it does not comply with some alignment constraint on it. For example, typically double precision floating point numbers occupy 8 bytes and have an alignment of 4 bytes; that is, their address must be a multiple of four. If a program tries to access such a number using an address that is not a multiple of four, a bus error will result. Opposites: aligned. See also: alignment; bus error.