In x86 assembly (and a lot of other contexts), 16 bits are called a word (a left over from 16 bit days when 16 bits were in fact a machine word), and larger data types are named dword (double word, 32 bits), qword (quad word, 64 bits), and so on. This terminology is even included in certain instruction mnemonics (movsb|movsw|movsd, ...).