AFAIK, before everything was byte-addressable and this became standard, people used to talk about "word" sizes. Some computers would have 36 or 38-bit words. The CDC 6000 had 60-bit words, where that was the smallest size value you could address in memory. For things like characters, you would have to pack multiple chars per word. The Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine had 36-bit words, and it used some of those bits to tag different data types so every value in memory had some basic type information attached to it.