I will sleep better tonight for it

Did you have you a good night's sleep? 'Cause this raises my old question that I ask every time some prescrip declares that, e.g., incent isn't a word. We're stretching a little farther on this one, but, what does it take for a set of phonemes to be a word? What is it beyond pronounceability, recognizability, and conveyance of meaning that is required to endow a group of phonemes with the blessings of word status? I've never had anyone even attempt an answer. I'm assuming here, for purposes of discussion, that 'conveyance of meaning' implies that at least some significant subset of the speakers of a given language will, in some specific context, understand the meaning of the word-candidate in that language.