Yes, that's correct. The word "word" is ambiguous and has a few meanings. Where I'm from, the "word" is the unit you can load/store to memory in a single instru

Yes, that's correct. The word "word" is ambiguous and has a few meanings. Where I'm from, the "word" is the unit you can load/store to memory in a single instruction. So if you can load a 32-bit quantity, that's your word size. The byte is the address granularity, while the word is the access granularity. Because of backwards compatibility, and because CPUs are far more flexible about loading more memory sizes than they traditionally have been, the meaning of "word" doesn't really matter anymore. In the context of Win32 and x86 programming, a WORD is 16 bits, a DWORD ("double word") is 32 bits, and a QWORD ("quad word") is 64 bits. That's most likely where you'll see it these days.