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[[Category:Computer Architecture]]{{Chris Tyler Draft}}
== Hardware Word ==
The word size is usually associated with the size of general-purpose [[Register|registers]] and the amount of data read from or written to memory at one time.
== Common Names for Various Word Sizes ==
== Byte ==
A byte is a collection of eight '''bits'''. It is a convenient size for use with many small character sets such as [[http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso646.html ASCII]], [[http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html ISO8859]], and [http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso646.html#EBCDIC EBCDIC]], and can also be used with the [[http://czyborra.com/utf/#UTF-8 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.
