A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s, red-ness, quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board, rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (he threw one too but he missed).
The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word, or sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols called graphemes, such as the letters of English.
Some semanticists have proposed a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations.
In English orthography, compound expressions may contain spaces. Examples are ice cream, air raid shelter, get up, and these must thus be considered as more than one word. (Ice, cream, air etc. indisputably exist as free forms, the case of get is less clear.) In contrast, brownstone is spelt as a single word and would thus be considered as such for most purposes even though brown and stone are free forms.
Vietnamese orthography, although using the Latin alphabet, delimits monosyllabic morphemes, not words. East Asian orthography (languages using CJK characters) also tend to delimit syllables (in the case of Chinese characters) or morae (in the case of kana) rather than full words. Hangul the Korean alphabet, delimits both syllables and words, by grouping graphemes into syllabic blocks but also adds spaces between words. Conversely, synthetic languages often combine many lexical morphemes into single words, making it difficult to boil them down to the traditional sense of words found more easily in analytic languages; this is especially difficult for polysynthetic languages, such as Inuktitut and Ubykh, where entire sentences may consist of a single word.
The classification into such classes is in the tradition of Dionysius Thrax, who distinguished eight categories: noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, preposition, adverb, conjunction and interjection.
In Indian grammatical tradition, Pāṇini introduced a similar fundamental classification into a nominal (nāma, suP) and a verbal (ākhyāta, tiN) class, based on the set of desinences taken by the word.
Category:Concepts Category:Lexical units Category:Syntactic entities Category:Units of linguistic morphology
ar:كلمة (لغة) an:Palabra ast:Pallabra az:Söz be:Слова be-x-old:Слова bs:Riječ br:Ger (yezhoniezh) bg:Дума ca:Paraula cv:Сăмах cs:Slovo cy:Gair da:Ord de:Wort et:Sõna es:Palabra eo:Vorto eu:Hitz fa:واژه hif:Word fo:Orð fr:Mot fy:Wurd gl:Palabra gan:詞 ko:낱말 hr:Riječ io:Vorto id:Kata ia:Vocabulo os:Дзырд is:Orð it:Parola he:מילה (בלשנות) krc:Сёз ka:სიტყვა kk:Сөз sw:Neno ht:Mo ku:Peyv la:Verbum (grammatica generalis) lv:Vārds lt:Žodis ln:Nkómbó hu:Szó mk:Збор mg:Teny ml:വാക്ക് mr:शब्द ms:Perkataan mwl:Palabra nl:Woord new:खंग्वः ja:語 no:Ord nn:Ord oc:Mot pnb:بول pap:Palabra pl:Wyraz pt:Palavra ksh:Woot (Kalle) ro:Cuvânt qu:Rima rue:Слово ru:Слово sah:Өс sq:Fjala scn:Palora (unitati) simple:Word sk:Slovo (lingvistika) sl:Beseda sr:Реч sh:Riječ fi:Sana sv:Ord tl:Salita ta:சொல் te:తెలుగు పదాలు th:คำ tr:Kelime uk:Слово ur:لفظ vi:Từ wa:Mot war:Pulong yi:ווארט bat-smg:Žuodis zh:單字This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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