Word (language)

This article is about the unit of language. For other uses of the term Word, please see Word (disambiguation).

A word is a unit of language — of speech and writing — which exists in contrast to other forms constitued of words, such as phrases and sentences. In normal discourse, a word is a meaningful unit of language. An exact definition of 'word' is difficult since it depends on what aspect of language, and and indeed what specific languages, are being discussed. For many language users, particularly those literate in a written language which demarcates units of language by spacing, for example, there is initially little doubt as to what constitutes a word: cat is a word, and it does not become two words by adding the plural -s; whereas the cat is certainly two words, making a phrase. In other languages, such as Swedish, the cat can be expressed as a single word by the application of an inflectional ending: kat and the definite marker -en combine to form katten. Other cases are more difficult: for example, there might be some confusion over whether fridge-freezer is one word or two.

Because of the ambiguity of what counts as a 'word', linguists often employ the term lexeme to refer to a 'minimally distinctive', abstract unit in language, and reserve 'word' as a more general term. For example, eat, ate, eaten, eats and eating are all different words, but also variants of a single lexeme. 'Minimally distinctive' might mean, as the linguist Leonard Bloomfield argued, that the unit can stand alone as an utterance in its own right, forming a single-word sentence (e.g. Eat!); or at least that native speakers somehow come to the intuition that such units are distinct from other units of language. Such attempts at a definition of 'word' are problematic, as they do not account for exceptions such as the and a, for which it is difficult to come up with acceptable contexts for these as single-word sentences; and they do not really explain what a word is in a satisfactory manner. Then again, linguists may also point out that language itself has so far eluded a satisfactory, explicit description of how it really works.

Other definitions involve the degree to which one can acceptably modify or distort the structure of the unit in question: if it remains 'cohesive', or its 'constituent' parts do not readily allow rearrangement, then the unit could be a word. For example, unlike the units in a sentence such as He ate the cake, the morphemes in antidisestablishmentarianism cannot be rearranged. Of course, this does not help when a single word is also a single morpheme, such as cat, and 'cohesion' in particular does not explain examples of infixation such as Abso-blinking-lutely!

'Word' can also mean different things depending on what aspect of language is examined. For example, in phonology (the study of the abstract units used to represent language, such as /k/ in cat), a phonological word may not be the same unit as a word in syntax, the study of how such units combine into larger structures such as sentences. Syntax also identifies units which are in some ways like words and in other respects more like inflections: clitics such as 've in I've, for example, popularly known in English as 'contractions', are phonologically dependent on other units (i.e. because they cannot stand separately from them: Have I? is possible but *'Ve I? is not) but syntactically occupy the position of a full word, e.g. have. In writing, units of language are often separated in a way that does not reflect the facts of phonetics; for example, English uses spacing to break up sequences of letters even though there are rarely physical pauses in running speech. A 'word', then, may be identified on phonological, orthographic, syntactic or semantic grounds.