Word

This is a draft only!
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on this information.

A word is a set number of bits managed as a unit.

Hardware Word

A hardware word is the group of bits normally managed by a processor. The word size is a distinguishing feature of a processor, and is typically a power-of-two multiple of eight bits (8, 16, 32, or 64 bits), although some rare or early processors used different word sizes.

The word size is usually associated with the size of general-purpose registers and the amount of data read from or written to memory at one time. Most modern processors can read/write alternate word sizes (for example, a "64-bit" x86_64 system can also read/write 16 and 8 bit values to/from memory).

Byte

A byte is a collection of eight bits. It is a convenient size for use with many small character sets such as [ASCII], [ISO8859], and EBCDIC], and can also be used with the [UTF-8] encoding of Unicode. It is often viewed as the smallest hardware word size that makes sense for general-purpose computing.

Most computers with larger hardware word sizes continue to rank memory, storage, and data sizes in bytes (or prefixed multiples of bytes) for comparability. For example, an x86_64 system will be advertised as having "16 gigabytes" of memory instead of "4 gigawords".

Octet

Another name for byte, commonly used in telecommunication standards and in French.

Nibble

A nibble (or nybble) is a half-byte, corresponding to one hexadecimal or BCD digit.