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