What’s a word?

Ask anyone what a word is and . . . they’ll look puzzled. In some sense, we all know what words are – we can list words of various sorts at the drop of a hat. But ask us to define explicitly what a word is, and we’re flummoxed. Someone might say that a word is a stretch of letters that occurs between blank spaces. But someone else is bound to point out that words don’t have to be written for us to know that they’re words. And in spoken (or signed) language, there are no spaces or pauses to delineate words. Yet we know what they are. Still another person might at this point try an answer like this: “A word is something small that means something,” to which a devil’s advocate might respond, “But what do you mean by ‘something small’?” This is the point at which it becomes necessary to define a few specialized linguistic terms.

Linguists define a morpheme as the smallest unit of language that has its own meaning. Simple words like giraffe, wiggle, or yellow are morphemes, but so are prefixes like re- and pre- and suffixes like -ize and -er. There’s far more to be said about morphemes, but for now we can use the term morpheme to help us come up with a more precise and coherent definition of word. Let us now define a word as one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a language. Words that consist of only one morpheme, like the words in (1), can be termed simple or simplex words. Words that are made up of more than one morpheme, like the ones in (2), are called complex:

(1) Simplex words

giraffe

fraud

murmur

oops

just

pistachio

(2) Complex words

opposition

intellectual

crystallize

prewash

repressive

blackboard

We now have a first pass at a definition of what a word is, but as we’ll see, we can be far more precise.