A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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.
Maybe ironically, neither one would be appropriate as a linguistic definition.
Or, in either field (formal language theory bridges both) it can mean any string of symbols, letters, or tokens.
"word" is a four letter word
Please, it's w*rd, we want to keep this f*mily friendly
Recursive ~~acronyms~~ definitions
Word!
Still even people new to writing have a good intuition about that but formalizing this intuition is a different story
xnopyt
And I love them for it. Seriously comfortable society is built on and by nerds.
Yeah I love it too. It was quite an interesting deep dive into that topic.
Saussure feelings
As a linguist, I'd just shrug.
"everyone knows what a word is, that is the definion"
What is Truth and what is God?