But does not define them in terms of hardware.

My numbers referred to the native widths of the hardware words. sizeof(int) would of course return those numbers divided by 8, but machines are almost universally referred to by bit width, not byte width. Intel 64 bit chips, not Intel 8 byte chips, for example. So sizeof(int) is still a function of hardware width, and hardware width is defined in terms of bits.

Perhaps I should have been a bit more specific, instead of leaping over fully internalized transforms without explanation? Here? In a discussion about hardware? And note that 36 bits is not a multiple of 8, which actually breaks sizeof() anyway.