For other uses see Word (disambiguation).

In language a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts with a morpheme which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh! rock red quick run expect) or several (rocks redness quickly running unexpected) whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned these are -s -ness -ly -ing un- -ed).

A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s red-ness quick-ly run-ning un-expect-ed) or more than one root in a compound (black-board rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language such as phrases (a red rock) clauses (I threw a rock) and sentences (he threw one too but he missed).

The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word or sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes and written words of symbols called graphemes such as the letters of English. Contents 1 Definitions 1.1 Semantic definition 1.2 Features 1.3 Word boundaries 1.3.1 Orthography 2 Morphology 3 Philosophy 4 Classes 5 See also 6 Footnotes 7 References 8 External links Definitions Further information: Lexeme and Lemma (linguistics)

The ease or difficulty of deciphering a word depends on the language. Dictionaries categorize a language's lexicon (i.e. its vocabulary) into lemmas. These can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a "word" in the opinion of the writers of that language. Words make up a language. Semantic definition

Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of "Minimal Free Forms" in 1926. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves.1 This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However some written words are not minimal free forms as they make no sense by themselves (for example the and of).2

Some semanticists have proposed a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning without circularity of other words and their associated conceptual denotations.3 Features

In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax words (also called lexical items in the literature) are construed as "bundles" of linguistic features that are united into a structure with form and meaning.4 For example the word "bears" has semantic features (it denotes real-world objects bears) category features (it is a noun) number features (it is plural and must agree with verbs pronouns and demonstratives in its domain) phonological features (it is pronounced a certain way) etc. Word boundaries

The task of defining what constitutes a "word" involves determining where one word ends and another word beginsin other words identifying word boundaries. There are several ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed: Potential pause: A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words or fail to separate two or more closely related words. Indivisibility: A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus I have lived in this village for ten years might become My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However some languages have infixes which are put inside a word. Similarly some have separable affixes; in the German sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an" the verb ankommen is separated. Phonetic boundaries: Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example in a language that regularly stresses the last syllable of a word a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish):5 the vowels within a given word share the same quality so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.

In practice linguists apply a mixture of all these methods to determine the word boundaries of any given sentence. Even with the careful application of these methods the exact definition of a word is often still very elusive. Orthographic boundaries: See below. Orthography In languages with a literary tradition there is interrelation between orthography and the question of what is considered a single word. Word separators (typically spaces) are common in modern orthography of languages using alphabetic scripts but these are (excepting isolated precedents) a relatively modern development (see also history of writing). In English orthography compound expressions may contain spaces. Examples are ice cream air raid shelter get up and these must thus be considered as more than one word. (Ice cream air etc. indisputably exist as free forms the case of get is less clear.) In contrast brownstone is spelt as a single word and would thus be considered as such for most purposes even though brown and stone are free forms. Vietnamese orthography although using the Latin alphabet delimits monosyllabic morphemes not words. East Asian orthography (languages using CJK characters) also tend to delimit syllables rather than full words. Conversely synthetic languages often combine many lexical morphemes into single words making it difficult to boil them down to the traditional sense of words found more easily in analytic languages; this is especially difficult for polysynthetic languages such as Inuktitut and Ubykh where entire sentences may consist of a single word. Morphology Main article: Morphology (linguistics) Further information: Inflection In synthetic languages a single word stem (for example love) may have a number of different forms (for example loves loving and loved). However for some purposes these are not usually considered to be different words but rather different forms of the same word. In these languages words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes. In Indo-European languages in particular the morphemes distinguished are the root optional suffixes a desinence. Thus the Proto-Indo-European *wrdhom would be analyzed as consisting of *wr- the zero grade of the root *wer- a root-extension *-dh- (diachronically a suffix) resulting in a complex root *wrdh- The thematic suffix *-o- the neuter gender nominative or accusative singular desinence *-m. Philosophy Philosophers have found words objects of fascination since at least the 5th century BC with the foundation of the philosophy of language. Plato analyzed words in terms of their origins and the sounds making them up concluding that there was some connection between sound and meaning though words change a great deal over time. John Locke wrote that the use of words "is to be sensible marks of ideas" though they are chosen "not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea".6 Wittgenstein's thought transitioned from a word as representation of meaning to "the meaning of a word is its use in the language."7 Classes Main article: Lexical category Grammar classifies a language's lexicon into several groups of words. The basic bipartite division possible for virtually every natural language is that of nouns vs. verbs. The classification into such classes is in the tradition of Dionysius Thrax who distinguished eight categories: noun verb adjective pronoun preposition adverb conjunction and interjection. In Indian grammatical tradition Pini introduced a similar fundamental classification into a nominal (nma suP) and a verbal (khyta tiN) class based on the set of desinences taken by the word. See also Grammar Lexeme Lexical item Lexicon Lexis (linguistics) Meaning (linguistics) Morphology (linguistics) Speech Utterance Longest words English words with unusual properties Footnotes Katamba 11 Fleming 77 Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 2002 Adger (2003) pp. 367. Bauer 9 www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/locke/ctb3c02.htm plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein References Adger David (2003). Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Barton David (1994). Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Blackwell Publishing. p. 96.  Bauer Laurie (1983). English Word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-28492-9.  Brown Keith R. (Ed.) (2005) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.). Elsevier. 14 vols. Crystal David (1995). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40179-8.  Fleming Michael et al. (2001). Meeting the Standards in Secondary English: A Guide to the ITT NC. Routledge. p. 77.  Goddard Cliff (2002). "The search for the shared semantic core of all languages". In Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings. Volume I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 540. http://www.une.edu.au/lcl/nsm/pdf/GoddardCh12002.pdf  Katamba Francis (2005). English Words: Structure History Usage. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-29892-X.  Plag Ingo (2003). Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-52563-2.  Simpson J.A. and E.S.C. Weiner ed (1989). Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-198-61186-2.  Wierzbicka Anna (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198700024.  External links Look up word in Wiktionary the free dictionary. What Is a Word a working paper by Larry Trask (see 1 for attribution) Department of Linguistics and English Language University of Sussex. v d eLexicography Types of reference works Dictionary  Glossary  Lexicon  Thesaurus Types of dictionaries Bilingual  Biographical  Conceptual  Defining  Electronic  Encyclopedic  Language for specific purposes dictionary  Machine-readable  Maximizing  Medical  Minimizing  Monolingual learner's  Multi-field  Phonetic  Picture  Reverse  Rhyming  Rime  Single-field  Specialized  Sub-field  Visual Lexicographic projects Lexigraf  WordNet Other List of lexicographers  List of online dictionaries v d eLexicology Major terms Lexicon  Idiolect  Word  Lexis  Lexical unit Elements Morpheme  Grapheme  Glyphs  Phoneme  Sememe  Seme  Lexeme  Lemma  Meronymy  Chereme Semantic relations Holonymy  Hyponymy  Troponymy  Idiom  Synonym  Antonymy  Lexical semantics  Semantic net Fonctions Function word  Headword Fields Morphology  Controlled vocabulary  English lexicology and lexicography  Lexicographic error  Lexicographic information cost  Linguistic prescription  Specialised lexicography  International scientific vocabulary