@b0rk My understanding is that things get very nuanced when discussing "words".
If I've got this right data is read/written by the CPU into RAM in larger chunks, then its cache hierarchy splits it up onto whichever wordsize the CPU wants?
I also think this page is slightly wrong -- my understanding is that data in memory is actually stored in words? (on my machine, 1 word = 4 bytes). But that feels like too much to get into here, and I'm still slightly confused about words