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There is no single answer to this question. A byte is universally defined as a tuple of 8 bits (sometimes bytes are also called octets, therefore).
However, a word commonly refers to the natural word for a given processor, that is the processor's preferred entity for arithmetic operations. The word is therefore typically defined by the processor's ALU width.
Typical 8, 16 or 32 bit processors have 8, 16 or 32 bit words (containing 1, 2 or 4 bytes), respectively. Other processors have another word size, such as 3 bytes per word, or 8.
In Windows programming, a word is often thought to refer to a 16 bit entity, mostly because the classic 32-bit Windows API makes frequent use of DWORD, a double-word, 32 bits or 4 bytes wide. However, these data types are not generally portable and are not recommended for use outside the specific context of this API.
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JudyAlthough a byte is typically 8-bits in length, there is no standard that actually specifies this. In general we say that a byte is the smallest unit of memory that may be addressed and since ANSI code pages use 7-bit encoding, a byte must be at least 7 bits in length. However, an 8-bit byte is notationally more convenient as we can represent any value it may hold using 2 hexadecimal digits, where each digit represents half-a-byte (commonly known as a nybble). In C++, all data types are measured in terms of whole bytes, however the standard does not specify the length of a byte other than it must be at least 8 bits. The char data type is the smallest data type and always has a length of 1 byte.
The length of a word is machine dependent but is typically some multiple of 8-bit bytes. For instance, a 32-bit system is said to have a word length of 4 bytes because that's the largest value that will fit in a single CPU register. A 64-bit system therefore has a word length of 8 bytes.
Some programming languages consider a word to be two bytes in length and a double word as being four bytes in length. However, these definitions are not universal and the actual lengths can vary according to the underlying architecture, even within the same language (different implementations may use different definitions).
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Eight bits or one character of data are?
Eight bits are 1 byte. The word 'byte' was coined from the word "by eight" - 1 bit multiplied by 8.
How do you make a 8 byte integer in C?
Use data-type 'long long' or 'int64_t' (from inttypes.h)
How many words are there in a 64 bit variable if a word is defined as 2 bytes?
Assuming a byte is 8 bits, then a 2 byte word is 16 bits. Therefore there are maximum of four 2 byte words in a 64-bit variable. Note that a byte is defined as being the smallest unit of addressable storage. As such there is no official standard that dictates its length; it is entirely hardware dependent. Some systems can address at the bit level, thus a byte would literally be just 1 bit in length. Although most systems today use an 8-bit byte, this is not always the case thus the term octet was defined to specifically mean an 8-bit byte.
What is a double byte?
A double byte is two bytes.
How is a 20 byte string value stored in memory?
As a 21 byte array of type char (including 1 byte for the null terminator).
