See "The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer", by Maurice V. Wilkes, David J. Wheeler, and Stanley Gill, copyright 1951,
pp. 5 section 1-4: "The store is divided into a number of registers or storage locations; the content of a storage location is a sequence of 0's and 1's, and may represent an order or a number.
The term word is used for the content of a storage location if it is desired to refer to it without specifying whether it represents a number or an order."
Jim
From: "Noel Chiappa" <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Cc: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Sent: Thursday, September 8, 2022 2:20:51 PM
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits?
> It was used, in the modern sense, in "Planning a Computer System",
> Buchholz,1962.
Also in the IBM "650 Manual of Operation", June, 1955. (Before I was
born! :-)
Noel