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(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org Cc: jnc(a)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? Also in the IBM "650 Manual of Operation", June, 1955. (Before I was born! :-) Noel