This is from the book Assembly Language Step By Step, Jeff Duntemann:
Here’s the quick tour: A bit is a single binary digit, 0 or 1. A byte is 8 bits side by side. A word is 2 bytes side by side. A double word is 2 words side by side. A quad word is 2 double words side by side.
And this is from the book Principles of Computer Organization and Assembly Language: Using the Java Virtual Machine, Patrick Juola:
For convenience, 8 bits are usually grouped into a single block, conventionally called a byte. The next-largest named block of bits is a word. The definition and size of a word are not absolute, but vary from computer to computer. A word is the size of the most convenient block of data for the computer to deal with.
So is a word 2 bytes (16 bits), or is it the most convenient block of data for the computer to deal with? (I am also not sure what this means..)
On x86/x64 processors, a byte is 8 bits, and there are 256 possible binary states in 8 bits, 0 thru 255. This is how the OS translates your keyboard key strokes into letters on the screen. When you press the 'A' key, the keyboard sends a binary signal equal to the number 97 to the computer, and the computer prints a lowercase 'a' on the screen. You can confirm this in any Windows text editing software by holding an ALT key, typing 97 on the NUMPAD, then releasing the ALT key. If you replace '97' with any number from 0 to 255, you will see the character associated with that number on the system's character code page printed on the screen.
If a character is 8 bits, or 1 byte, then a WORD must be at least 2 characters, so 16 bits or 2 bytes. Traditionally, you might think of a word as a varying number of characters, but in a computer, everything that is calculable is based on static rules. Besides, a computer doesn't know what letters and symbols are, it only knows how to count numbers. So, in computer language, if a WORD is equal to 2 characters, then a double-word, or DWORD, is 2 WORDs, which is the same as 4 characters or bytes, which is equal to 32 bits. Furthermore, a quad-word, or QWORD, is 2 DWORDs, same as 4 WORDs, 8 characters, or 64 bits.
Note that these terms are limited in function to the Windows API for developers, but may appear in other circumstances (eg. the Linux dd command uses numerical suffixes to compound byte and block sizes, where c is 1 byte and w is bytes).
This is from the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.
.. the memory had been reduced to 4096 "words" of eighteen bits each. (A "bit" is a binary digit, either a 1 or 0. A series of binary numbers is called a "word").
As the other answers suggest, a "word" does not seem to have a fixed length.
"most convenient block of data" probably refers to the width (in bits) of the WORD, in correspondance to the system bus width, or whatever underlying "bandwidth" is available. On a 16 bit system, with WORD being defined as 16 bits wide, moving data around in chunks the size of a WORD will be the most efficient way. (On hardware or "system" level.)
With Java being more or less platform independant, it just defines a "WORD" as the next size from a "BYTE", meaning "full bandwidth". I guess any platform that's able to run Java will use 32 bits for a WORD.
In addition to the other answers, a further example of the variability of word size (from one system to the next) is in the paper Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit by Aleph One:
We must remember that memory can only be addressed in multiples of the word size. A word in our case is 4 bytes, or 32 bits. So our 5 byte buffer is really going to take 8 bytes (2 words) of memory, and our 10 byte buffer is going to take 12 bytes (3 words) of memory.
The second quote is correct, the size of a word varies from computer to computer. The ARM NEON architecture is an example of an architecture with 32-bit words, where 64-bit quantities are referred to as "doublewords" and 128-bit quantities are referred to as "quadwords":
A NEON operand can be a vector or a scalar. A NEON vector can be a 64-bit doubleword vector or a 128-bit quadword vector.
Normally speaking, 16-bit words are only found on 16-bit systems, like the Amiga 500.
Source: Stackoverflow.com