Up to now, we've been grouping our bits in bytes using established standards. There's another grouping method we need to know, and it depends on the computer system: Word size.
A word is a natural unit of data in a computer system. Your computer's processor can handle one word at a time. For example, a 16-bit processor can handle 16 bits at a time. Most modern computers have a word size of 16, 32 or 64 bits.
Incidentally, word size also determines the address size of your computer. The main memory of your computer is divided into many 'containers'. Each 'container' has an address, just as each building on a street has a number. The maximum number of addresses in a 32-bit computer is 232, or a whopping 4,294,967,296 addresses. Assuming that each 'container' is one byte, the computer would have 512 GB of main memory!
If that sounds amazing, it gets better. A 64-bit computer with one byte per address has 2048 PB (petabytes) of main memory. (One petabyte equals 1024 terabytes.)