page_title: Word
section_title: Morphology
hierarchical_section_title: Word / Morphology
caption_attribution_description: Strobist - Focal m200 about 6ft left of camera, bounced off ceiling
context_page_description: In linguistics, a word of a spoken language can be defined as the smallest sequence of phonemes that can be uttered in isolation with objective or practical meaning. For many languages, words also correspond to sequences of graphemes in their standard writing systems that are delimited by spaces wider than the normal inter-letter space, or by other graphical conventions. The concept of "word" is usually distinguished from that of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of speech which has a meaning, even if it will not stand on its own.
  In many languages, the notion of what constitutes a "word" may be mostly learned as part of learning the writing system. This is the case of the English language, and of most languages that are written with alphabets derived from the ancient Latin or Greek alphabets.
  There still remains no consensus among linguists about the proper definition of "word" in a spoken language that is independent of its writing system, nor about the precise distinction between it and "morpheme". This issue is particularly debated for Chinese and other languages of East Asia, and may be moot for Afro-Asiatic languages.
context_section_description: Morphology is the study of word formation and structure. In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, for some purposes these are not usually considered to be different words, but rather different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes.
  In Indo-European languages in particular, the morphemes distinguished are:
  The root.
  Optional suffixes.
  A inflectional suffix.
  Thus, the Proto-Indo-European *wr̥dhom would be analyzed as consisting of
  *wr̥-, the zero grade of the root *wer-.
  A root-extension *-dh- (diachronically a suffix), resulting in a complex root *wr̥dh-.
  The thematic suffix *-o-.
  The neuter gender nominative or accusative singular suffix *-m.
caption: Letters and words
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