In computing, a word is the natural unit of data used by a particular processor design. A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor. The number of bits or digits^[a] in a word (the word size, word width, or word length) is an important characteristic of any specific processor design or computer architecture.

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The size of a word is reflected in many aspects of a computer's structure and operation; the majority of the registers in a processor are usually word-sized and the largest datum that can be transferred to and from the working memory in a single operation is a word in many (not all) architectures. The largest possible address size, used to designate a location in memory, is typically a hardware word (here, "hardware word" means the full-sized natural word of the processor, as opposed to any other definition used).

Documentation for older computers with fixed word size commonly states memory sizes in words rather than bytes or characters. The documentation sometimes uses metric prefixes correctly, sometimes with rounding, e.g., 65 kilowords (kW) meaning for 65536 words, and sometimes uses them incorrectly, with kilowords (kW) meaning 1024 words (2¹⁰) and megawords (MW) meaning 1,048,576 words (2²⁰). With standardization on 8-bit bytes and byte addressability, stating memory sizes in bytes, kilobytes, and megabytes with powers of 1024 rather than 1000 has become the norm, although there is some use of the IEC binary prefixes.

Several of the earliest computers (and a few modern as well) use binary-coded decimal rather than plain binary, typically having a word size of 10 or 12 decimal digits, and some early decimal computers have no fixed word length at all. Early binary systems tended to use word lengths that were some multiple of 6-bits, with the 36-bit word being especially common on mainframe computers. The introduction of ASCII led to the move to systems with word lengths that were a multiple of 8-bits, with 16-bit machines being popular in the 1970s before the move to modern processors with 32 or 64 bits.^[1] Special-purpose designs like digital signal processors, may have any word length from 4 to 80 bits.^[1]

The size of a word can sometimes differ from the expected due to backward compatibility with earlier computers. If multiple compatible variations or a family of processors share a common architecture and instruction set but differ in their word sizes, their documentation and software may become notationally complex to accommodate the difference (see Size families below).

Depending on how a computer is organized, word-size units may be used for:

Fixed-point numbers

Holders for fixed point, usually integer, numerical values may be available in one or in several different sizes, but one of the sizes available will almost always be the word. The other sizes, if any, are likely to be multiples or fractions of the word size. The smaller sizes are normally used only for efficient use of memory; when loaded into the processor, their values usually go into a larger, word sized holder.

Floating-point numbers

Holders for floating-point numerical values are typically either a word or a multiple of a word.

Addresses

Holders for memory addresses must be of a size capable of expressing the needed range of values but not be excessively large, so often the size used is the word though it can also be a multiple or fraction of the word size.

Registers

Processor registers are designed with a size appropriate for the type of data they hold, e.g. integers, floating-point numbers, or addresses. Many computer architectures use general-purpose registers that are capable of storing data in multiple representations.

Memory–processor transfer

When the processor reads from the memory subsystem into a register or writes a register's value to memory, the amount of data transferred is often a word. Historically, this amount of bits which could be transferred in one cycle was also called a catena in some environments (such as the Bull GAMMA 60 [fr]).^[2][3] In simple memory subsystems, the word is transferred over the memory data bus, which typically has a width of a word or half-word. In memory subsystems that use caches, the word-sized transfer is the one between the processor and the first level of cache; at lower levels of the memory hierarchy larger transfers (which are a multiple of the word size) are normally used.

Unit of address resolution

In a given architecture, successive address values almost^[b] always designate successive units of memory; this unit is the unit of address resolution. In most computers, the unit is either a character (e.g. a byte) or a word. (A few computers have used bit resolution.) If the unit is a word, then a larger amount of memory can be accessed using an address of a given size at the cost of added complexity to access individual characters. On the other hand, if the unit is a byte, then individual characters can be addressed (i.e. selected during the memory operation).

Instructions

Machine instructions are normally the size of the architecture's word, such as in RISC architectures, or a multiple of the "char" size that is a fraction of it. This is a natural choice since instructions and data usually share the same memory subsystem. In Harvard architectures the word sizes of instructions and data need not be related, as instructions and data are stored in different memories; for example, the processor in the 1ESS electronic telephone switch has 37-bit instructions and 23-bit data words.

When a computer architecture is designed, the choice of a word size is of substantial importance. There are design considerations which encourage particular bit-group sizes for particular uses (e.g. for addresses), and these considerations point to different sizes for different uses. However, considerations of economy in design strongly push for one size, or a very few sizes related by multiples or fractions (submultiples) to a primary size. That preferred size becomes the word size of the architecture.

Character size was in the past (pre-variable-sized character encoding) one of the influences on unit of address resolution and the choice of word size. Before the mid-1960s, characters were most often stored in six bits; this allowed no more than 64 characters, so the alphabet was limited to upper case. Since it is efficient in time and space to have the word size be a multiple of the character size, word sizes in this period were usually multiples of 6 bits (in binary machines). A common choice then was the 36-bit word, which is also a good size for the numeric properties of a floating point format.

After the introduction of the IBM System/360 design, which uses eight-bit characters and supports lower-case letters, the standard size of a character (or more accurately, a byte) becomes eight bits. Word sizes thereafter are naturally multiples of eight bits, with 16, 32, and 64 bits being commonly used.

As computer designs have grown more complex, the central importance of a single word size to an architecture has decreased. Although more capable hardware can use a wider variety of sizes of data, market forces exert pressure to maintain backward compatibility while extending processor capability. As a result, what might have been the central word size in a fresh design has to coexist as an alternative size to the original word size in a backward compatible design. The original word size remains available in future designs, forming the basis of a size family.

In the mid-1970s, DEC designed the VAX to be a 32-bit successor of the 16-bit PDP-11. They used word for a 16-bit quantity, while longword referred to a 32-bit quantity; this terminology is the same as the terminology used for the PDP-11. This was in contrast to earlier machines, where the natural unit of addressing memory would be called a word, while a quantity that is one half a word would be called a halfword. In fitting with this scheme, a VAX quadword is 64 bits. They continued this 16-bit word/32-bit longword/64-bit quadword terminology with the 64-bit Alpha.

Another example is the x86 family, of which processors of three different word lengths (16-bit, later 32- and 64-bit) have been released, while word continues to designate a 16-bit quantity. As software is routinely ported from one word-length to the next, some APIs and documentation define or refer to an older (and thus shorter) word-length than the full word length on the CPU that software may be compiled for. Also, similar to how bytes are used for small numbers in many programs, a shorter word (16 or 32 bits) may be used in contexts where the range of a wider word is not needed (especially where this can save considerable stack space or cache memory space). For example, Microsoft's Windows API maintains the programming language definition of WORD as 16 bits, despite the fact that the API may be used on a 32- or 64-bit x86 processor, where the standard word size would be 32 or 64 bits, respectively. Data structures containing such different sized words refer to them as:

• WORD (16 bits/2 bytes)
• DWORD (32 bits/4 bytes)
• QWORD (64 bits/8 bytes)

A similar phenomenon has developed in Intel's x86 assembly language – because of the support for various sizes (and backward compatibility) in the instruction set, some instruction mnemonics carry "d" or "q" identifiers denoting "double-", "quad-" or "double-quad-", which are in terms of the architecture's original 16-bit word size.

An example with a different word size is the IBM System/360 family. In the System/360 architecture, System/370 architecture and System/390 architecture, there are 8-bit bytes, 16-bit halfwords, 32-bit words and 64-bit doublewords. The z/Architecture, which is the 64-bit member of that architecture family, continues to refer to 16-bit halfwords, 32-bit words, and 64-bit doublewords, and additionally features 128-bit quadwords.

In general, new processors must use the same data word lengths and virtual address widths as an older processor to have binary compatibility with that older processor.

Often carefully written source code – written with source-code compatibility and software portability in mind – can be recompiled to run on a variety of processors, even ones with different data word lengths or different address widths or both.

^[8][9]

• Integer (computer science)