If you convert a 5-letter word to binary, how many digits does the result have?

It depends on how the characters are encoded. English words are usually stored in strings or arrays of 8-bit bytes with one character per byte. That would require 5*8 = 40 bits, plus whatever overhead was needed by the programming language to describe the string or array.

However, you can do better than that. If capitalization doesn't matter, no abbreviations, contractions or hyphens are used, and exactly 5 letters are in the word, then you only have 26 choices for each of five letters: 26^5 = 11,881,376 different letter patterns are possible. You can assign a unique 24-bit number to each of those, since 2^24 is over 16 million.

Non-English alphabets will have different requirements. Hawaiian, for example, uses only 13 letters, plus 6 more symbols (the 5 vowels with macrons, and a ' stop) for a total of 19 choices for each letter of the word. That will fit 5 characters in only 22 bits.

A high-level programming language may use quite a bit more, to allow for multiple international alphabets. The Unicode standard is widely used, where essentially all modern languages in widespread use can be encoded using 16 bits per character, and that's what you see as the basic character data type in languages like Java and C#. In either of those, a char[5] array will take 16*5 = 80 bits, plus overhead to describe the array object.

--About the Updates:

If you're not interested in details, read my first sentence only.

There is no agreed-upon way to "convert a 5-letter word to binary", so if you want a meaningful answer then you need to specify exactly how you propose to do that. That's what I mean by "how the characters are encoded."

If you need to guess, I gave you the first guess: 5*8 = 40 bits.

There is no single answer to this question. Computer don't actually store "letters" they store everything as a binary number so there have to be some rules to define how letters are represented by number. There are numerous rules for how to do this (called encodings) that would take up a different number of bits.

As husoski stated, 8 bits per byte and one byte per letter = 40 bits for 5 letter word. That's the most common.

The above answer is correct but it also depends on the native language - some languages use double words, like Japanese and Polish and quite a few others.

Hi That might depend in what protocol it is sent from a 32bit word to a 128 bit word. so sunshine you have an awful lot to learn about how this internet actually works.