Memory Organization in Computer
99% of machines are byte addressable.  A 16 bit word would occupy 2 addressable bytes.  There are some unique machines where this is not the case, but for most RISC machines (especially the ones covered in an introductory computer architecture course) it's all byte addressable. Some architectures can address more than one byte at time (e.g. the memory data bus is not 8 bits), but the memory itself can be addressed at the byte level.