Recall:
Information is stored in the memory as a collection of bits.
Collection of bits are stored or retrieved simultaneously is called a “word”.
Number of bits in a word is called “word length”.
Word length can be 16 to 64 bits.
Another collection which is more basic than a word:
Collection of 8 bits known as a “byte”.
Bytes are grouped into words, word length can also be expressed as a number of bytes instead of the number of bits:
Word length of 16 bits, is equivalent to word length of 2 bytes.
Words may be 2 bytes (older architectures), 4 bytes (current architectures), or 8+ bytes (modern architectures).