Word
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration: a close-up of a mouth in the film The Big Swallow (1901)
| 'The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things' --Through the Looking-Glass
"Nothing is more usual than for philosophers encroaching on the province of grammarians, and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern." -- David Hume "Words: Can't say what they mean don't mean what they say" --Tom Tom Club "I like words" -- Robert Pirosh |
Illustration: Laocoön and His Sons ("Clamores horrendos" detail), photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen.
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A word is the smallest free form (an item that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content) in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme (e.g. wolf), but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form (e.g. the English plural morpheme -s).
Typically, a word will consist of a root or stem, and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create other units of language, such as phrases, clauses, and/or sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together form a compound.
Word may refer to a spoken word or a written word, or sometimes, the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of phonemes, and written words of graphemes.
See also
- Grammar
- Lexeme
- Lexical item
- Lexicon
- Lexis (linguistics)
- Meaning (linguistics)
- Morphology (linguistics)
- Semantic primes
- Speech
- Utterance
See also
- Last words
- Meaning
- Context
- Seven dirty words
- Neologism
- Roget's Thesaurus
- Etymology
- A word is worth a thousand pictures
