And I love them for it. Seriously comfortable society is built on and by nerds.
What is Truth and what is God?
If you want a clear definition, ask a mathematician:
A word is any written product of group elements and their inverses.
Or a computer scientist:
A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor.
Or, in either field (formal language theory bridges both) it can mean any string of symbols, letters, or tokens.
Maybe ironically, neither one would be appropriate as a linguistic definition.
“word” is a four letter word
Please, it’s w*rd, we want to keep this f*mily friendly
Recursive
acronymsdefinitionsWord!
xnopyt
Still even people new to writing have a good intuition about that but formalizing this intuition is a different story
From which Tom Scott video is this ?
Thanks
As a linguist, I’d just shrug.
“everyone knows what a word is, that is the definion”
Saussure feelings