hexdump confusion -

I am playing with the Unix hexdump utility. My input file is UTF-8 encoded, which has a single character, , which is in C3 B1 hexadecimal UTF-8

  hexdump Test.txt 0000000 b1c3 0000002  

huh? It shows with B1C3 - what I expected was the inverse! Can anyone explain?

I do this to get the desired product:

  hexdump-c test.txt 00000000 c3 b1. .. | 00000002  

I understand that I understand system encoding.

The reason for this is that hexdump is the default for using 16-bit terms and you are running on a small-endian architecture. Byte sequence B1C3 is thus interpreted as hex term c3b1 . -C Option to work with hexdump words instead of bytes.