[coldacid]

8086 let you address the upper and lower halves of the 16-bit registers as well, so don't trick yourself into thinking there was just one register width available in the sense that everything could only be treated as 16-bit words.

[colejohnson66]

Many 8 bit processors had the same “feature”. For example, the Z80’s 8 bit registers were internally just halves of a 16 bit register.