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American Heritage Dictionary (27)

noun A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes.
noun Something said; an utterance, remark, or comment: May I say a word about that?
noun Computer Science A set of bits constituting the smallest unit of addressable memory.

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Century Dictionary (51)

Motor word in psychology and phonetics, the word as spoken; the word as presented in kinesthetic terms: opposed to auditory, visual, written word. Scripture, Exper. Phonetics, p. 83.
A sound, or combination of sounds, used in any language as the sign of a conception, or of a conception together with its grammatical relations; the smallest bit of human language forming a grammatical part of speech; a vocable; a term. A word may be any part of speech, as verb, noun, particle, etc.; it may be radical, as love, or derivative, as lover, lovely, loveliness, or an inflected form, as loves, loved; it may be simple, or compound, as love-sick. Anything is a word that can be used as an individual member of a sentence, and that is not separable into parts usable independently and coördinatcly in making a sentence. A word is a spoken sign that has arrived at its value as used in any language by a series of historical changes, and that holds its value by virtue of usage, being exposed to such further changes, of form and of meaning, as usage may prescribe. The conception involved in a word may be of any grade, from the simplest, as one, to the most derived and complicated, as political, and the grammatical relations involved may also be of any degree, from true to untruthfulness, or from (Latin) ama to amabitur. Geffray the letters after breke and rayd, Fro wurde unto wurd. Rom. of Partenay (E. E. T. S.), l. 3187. Sixe wordes out of which all the whole dittie is made, euery of those sixe commencing and ending his verse by course. Puttenham, Arte of Eng. Poesie, p. 72. Words are but the current tokens or marks of popular notions of things. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, ii.215. Words are sensible signs necessary for communication. Locke, Human Understanding, III. ii. 1. The deeper and more complex parts of human nature can be exhibited by means of words alone. Macaulay, Moore's Byron. Words, which are a set of clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to tones and expression of the features. O. W. Holmes, Professor, viii.
The letter or letters or other characters, written or printed, which represent such a vocable: as, a word misprinted.

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Everything except this memorable portion of the word is then dropped, and a new morpheme is substituted in an innovation; once the innovation is generally known, it suggests a pattern for further combinations with the neomorpheme, whose meaning generalizes upon the model's salient contemporary import. — VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XVI No 1
(It might be noted that the word is also used for a skating maneuver, which is also a nonconcrete object.) navaho a strong to vivid orange that is redder and darker than orpiment orange and slightly redder and darker than Big Four yellow. — VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol X No 3
If such a word is the name of a unit, it is accented on the first syllable, but if it is the name of an instrument ..., it is accented on the syllable ending in the "m" of "meter." — VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol IV No 3
The ultimate origin of the word is an Egyptian town Canopus, evidently well known for the notorious insect. — VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XVIII No 3
If the word is a vogue word, — VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol IV No 2

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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (3)

American Heritage Dictionary (1)

Middle English, from Old English; see wer-⁵ in Indo-European roots.

Century Dictionary (2)

Early modern English also woord; from Middle English word, wurd, weord (plural word, wordes), from Anglo-Saxon word (plural word) =Old Saxon word = OFries. word, werd, wird = D. Low German woord = Old High German Middle High German G. wort = Icelandic orth (for *vord) = Swedish Danish ord = Gothic (Moesogothic) waurd, a word, = Lithuanian wardas, a name, = Latin verbum, a word, verb; orig. ‘a thing spoken’; cf. Greek εἰρειν, speak, ἐρεῖν, question, ῤήτωρ, speaker, etc. (see rhetor). Doublet of verb.
from Middle English worden, wordien; from word, n.

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