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In linguistics, the term ‘word’ is a conceptual enigma. Although linguistically it is treated as one of the fundamental compositional units of a language, in the history of linguistics, the independent identity of a word has often been questioned, challenged or ignored. Scholars of linguistics have been often reluctant to acknowledge the separate linguistic identity of words because of their varied surface forms and functions within a piece of text. This leads Matthews (1974: 147) to argue that it is not a word, but a morpheme, which is important in establishing a relation of a word with phonology, syntax and semantics. Aronoff (1981) also ignores the separate identity of words as he considers a word as nothing but a phonetic string, which is connected to other linguistic entities lying outside the string. Selkirk (1983), on the other hand, treats words from a purely syntactic point of view as she identifies a set of word formation rules, which are applied to generate words. Bybee (1985) interlinks words with morphology to argue that a word should never be studied free from its meaning, as the meaning of morphemes and contexts determine several linguistic properties used in the formal expression of words. Jensen (1990) argues that it is not words but morphemes which are primary structural units, and which are typically but not necessarily meaningful. Therefore, it is sensible to focus on morphemes rather than on words in word formation. Spencer (1991) tries to build up an interface that underlies morphology and phonology to understand the linguistic entity of words. His basic idea of words includes inflectional morphology with an underlying interface between syntax and morphology by which one can explore the processes involved in word formation. In essence, a word is a complex linguistic concept, which is difficult to define in straight terms. Citing different examples from various languages as well as observations of various experts in the field, it can be argued that the concept of the word is actually interlinked with several linguistic issues, such as, pronunciation, lexicology, orthography, morphology, grammar, meaning, derivation, inflection, convention, usage, etc. which directly or indirectly play a crucial role in the identification of words in a natural language. Keeping all these issues in mind we address the problem of word identification in the following sections. In Section 2, we focus on the naïve realization of words as found in the general conceptualization of the concept by the common people; in Section 3, we highlight those concepts that are presented by traditional, structural, and generative linguistics. After these generalizations, we treat words from seven different angles of linguistics: word as a phonetic and phonological unit (Section 4); word as an orthographic unit (Section 5); word as a morphological unit (Section 6); word as a grammatical unit (Section 7); word as a semantic unit (Section 8); word as a lexical unit (Section 9), and word as a lexicographic unit (Section 10).
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