Definitions
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noun
The smallest piece of language that has its own meaning.
Examples
- Clothing is a single word in English.
- Each word in the sentence has its own meaning.
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noun
A spoken unit of language with a meaning.
Examples
- The priest's words grew louder as the ceremony went on.
- She repeated every word slowly for the class.
-
noun
A written unit of language made of letters.
Examples
- I could not read the last word on the page.
- He circled every word he did not know.
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noun
A unit of language accepted as real, for example in a dictionary.
Examples
- How often must I tell you, ain't is not a word?
- That is not even a word. It is not in the dictionary.
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noun
A sign used in a sign language.
Examples
- She signed the word for thank you.
- He learned the word for family in sign language.
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noun
A set of letters or sounds that may have no meaning.
Examples
- The teacher said a nonsense word and asked for its first sound.
- The book of life has millions of words made from four letters.
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noun
A unit of text used for counting length.
Examples
- The essay must be at least five hundred words.
- The document came to just under a thousand words.
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noun
In computing, a fixed group of bits handled together.
Examples
- A register in this design is 32 bits, called a word.
- The processor loads one word from memory at a time.
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noun
In some computer systems, a group of exactly 16 bits.
Examples
- The register still stores a word, even on modern 64 bit systems.
- A word in this context is always 16 bits.
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noun
In computing, a piece of text that is not a command.
Examples
- The parser treats any unknown word as an argument.
- Each word in the input is processed separately.