[TUHS] Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits?

[Douglas McIlroy]

Anecdote prompted by the advent of Burroughs in this thread:

At the 1968 NATO conference on Software Engineering, the discussion
turned to language design strategies. I noted that the design of Algol
68, for example, presupposed a word-based machine, whereupon Burroughs
architect Bob Barton brought the house down with the remark, "In the
beginning was the Word, all right--but it was not a fixed number of
bits!"

[Algol 68's presupposition is visible in declarations like "long long
long ... int". An implementation need support only a limited number of
"longs", but each supported variety must have a definite maximum
value, which is returned by an "environment enquiry" function. For
amusement, consider the natural idea of implementing the longest
variety with bignums.]

Doug