What is overflow?

Overflow is when something gets too big to fit where it’s supposed to be.

Imagine you have a backpack that can hold 10 toy blocks. You put in 10 blocks, that's perfect. But if you try to add an eleventh block, there's no room! That extra block spills out of the bag or gets crushed. That’s overflow, when something goes beyond its space.

Think of a jam jar. It can hold so much jam before it's full. If you keep adding more and more, eventually it will overflow, the jam will spill out the top. The jar is like a container that has a limit. When you go past that limit, boom, there’s overflow!

In computers, numbers can also overflow. If a computer is only allowed to use 3 digits for counting and it tries to count higher than 999, the extra number doesn’t just disappear, it starts from the beginning again, like a clock that goes back to 12 after 11. That's how overflow works in real life!