Why does counter have the size of 2 bytes?

I thought counter is the type of integer and integer has the size of 4 bytes. What is the reason behind the assumption that counter has the size of 2 bytes ?

While the standard datatype of integer, int, has a size of 4 bytes, the datatype short has a size of 2 bytes. The smaller-sized integer has been chosen to reduce the size of the user’s data. This size is sufficient for our application.