Meaning – The word halfword, refers to the contiguous sequence of bits or characters that constitutes half a computer word and can be addressed as a unit.
In the context of computing, a single word is the natural unit of data used by a particular processor design. A word is a fixed-sized piece of data handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor.
The size of a word is reflected in many aspects of a computer’s structure and operation; the majority of the registers in a processor are usually word-sized and the largest piece of data that can be transferred to and from the working memory in a single operation is a word in many different architectures.
Example of usage – “The term half word is used in contemporary computing to refer to common word sizes relative to a 32-bit base word size. As a result, a halfword is equivalent to 16 bits.”
