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Word refers to the basic unit of language, used to represent ideas, objects, actions, or concepts. A word can be spoken, written, or signed and is composed of one or more morphemes, which are the smallest meaning-bearing elements in a language. Words are essential to communication and form the building blocks of sentences and phrases. In both everyday use and scholarly study, the word serves as a critical element for understanding and conveying meaning. The first recorded use of word in English dates back to the 9th century during the Old English period.

The etymology of word originates from the Old English term “word,” itself derived from the Proto-Germanic root “wurdan,” meaning “to speak” or “to say.” This root traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root “wer-,” which also conveys the act of speaking. Similar cognates can be found in Latin (“verbum”) and Greek (“eirein”). The evolution of the word highlights its enduring significance in language development, illustrating its adaptability and centrality in both spoken and written communication across cultures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/word

Snippet from Wikipedia: Word

A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition.^: 13:618 Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.^: 6

The concept of "word" is distinguished from that of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of language that has a meaning, even if it cannot stand on its own. Words are made out of at least one morpheme. Morphemes can also be joined to create other words in a process of morphological derivation.^: 768 In English and many other languages, the morphemes that make up a word generally include at least one root (such as "rock", "god", "type", "writ", "can", "not") and possibly some affixes ("-s", "un-", "-ly", "-ness"). Words with more than one root ("[type][writ]er", "[cow][boy]s", "[tele][graph]ically") are called compound words. Contractions ("can't", "would've") are words formed from multiple words made into one. In turn, words are combined to form other elements of language, such as phrases ("a red rock", "put up with"), clauses ("I threw a rock"), and sentences ("I threw a rock, but missed").

In many languages, the notion of what constitutes a "word" may be learned as part of learning the writing system. This is the case for the English language, and for most languages that are written with alphabets derived from the ancient Latin or Greek alphabets. In English orthography, the letter sequences "rock", "god", "write", "with", "the", and "not" are considered to be single-morpheme words, whereas "rocks", "ungodliness", "typewriter", and "cannot" are words composed of two or more morphemes ("rock"+"s", "un"+"god"+"li"+"ness", "type"+"writ"+"er", and "can"+"not").

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