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In computer science, a “word” is a fundamental unit of data that a particular processor or computer architecture is designed to handle efficiently. It represents a fixed-size group of bits (binary digits) that are processed as a single entity by the processor’s instruction set. The size of a word is architecture-dependent; common word sizes include 16 bits (2 bytes), 32 bits (4 bytes), and 64 bits (8 bytes). The word size affects the amount of data the processor can process in one operation, the addressable memory space, and the overall performance of the system. For example, a 64-bit processor can manipulate larger chunks of data and address more memory than a 32-bit processor, leading to improved performance in many applications. Processors are optimized to work with data in word-sized chunks, so using word-aligned data can greatly improve performance. Misaligned data may require extra operations to access, slowing down execution.