When we ask “what’s a word?” we may be asking about the fundamental nature of wordhood – as we saw, a far thornier philosophical question than it would seem at first blush. Native speakers of a language seem to know intuitively what a ‘word’ is in their language, even if they have trouble coming up with a definition of ‘word’. Interestingly, the Oxford American Dictionary seems to bank on this intuitive knowledge when it defines a word as “a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.” We’ve already debunked part of the OAD definition: languages need not be written, but they still have words, and words don’t have blank space between them in spoken language. Nevertheless, the OAD’s definition works for most people: most dictionary users probably do not know the word morpheme, which we used in our definition of word.

but the OAD relies on the likelihood that they will not first think of something like the prefix re- as a single meaningful element, or something like irniarualiunga which means ‘I am making a doll’ in Central Alaskan Yup’ik (Mithun 1999: 203), and constitutes not only a word, but also a whole sentence. In other words, the OAD’s definition works because dictionary users already have an intuitive idea of what a word is!

Morphologists, however, have the luxury of being more precise: we can define a word as a sequence of one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a language. But in doing so, we have not exhausted what’s interesting about our question

We saw that there is a second way of interpreting it, one that seems far more concrete at first: we can interpret our question as meaning “Is xyz a word?” where xyz is a specific morpheme or sequence of morphemes. Taken this way, our question asks what it means to say that xyz is a word of English, or Central Alaskan Yup’ik, or some other language. On the one hand, we are always making up new words, and when we say them, others understand what we mean.