Friday, August 26, 2016

What is a word?


What is a word?

By: Wang Yujiang



What is a word? As you read this question, you know at least four English words, however you might not know what a word is exactly, even if you asked linguists or checked dictionaries. The following is the definition of a word from my Webster’s Dictionary: “A word is a meaningful unit of a language, consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation.” Unfortunately the definition is self-contradictory. If a word is one or more spoken sounds, you could not read it. If a word you can read, it is not one or more spoken sounds. Only when you read a word aloud, you utter one or more spoken sounds, which is not a word.

Linguistically a word is a letter or several letters between the spaces or punctuations in a sentence. A word is the smallest unit in a sentence.

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