The question is, has anyone ever made a general purpose computer with and odd word size (a word size of one bit doesn't count)? You bet. IBM's first production computer had odd word sizes. Their prime consideration in determining the word size for their computer was that a word should be able to represent 10 decimal digits. This required 34 bits. Add a sign bit, and you have the full 35. The machine could also manipulate 17-bit signed halfwords. There were also a number of computers with variable word lengths. A major representative of this type was IBM's 1400 line (1401, 1410). These computers represented numbers as sequence of character-equivalents (I don't remember if EBCDIC was the code yp