tsuwm has suggested that my question about the qualifications necessary to grace a collection of phonemes with the honor of being a word deserved its own thread. I agree.

Dub-dub' suggests, for starters, that "eoxlibnsdaienvlab" is not a word. We can certainly agree that it contains consonant clusters that are not found in any other English word. And, for purposes of discussion, we may as well limit ourselves to English words, so it seems like a reasonable thing to say that "eoxlibnsdaienvlab" is not a word. "Inciteful" on the other hand, is not only made up of quite pronounceable consonant clusters, but it is composed of nothing but perfectly legal morphemes. Note that I am not trying to claim word status for "inciteful", just wondering what it takes to be a word. And noting that "inciteful" is a common misspelling of "insightful" does not mean that it couldn't means something else.

Inciteful could be a very useful word if one were commenting upon insightful citations. It would depend upon context, but if the point were clear, then this created word would be understood from context. I'd say 'inciteful' would be a very good and useful word if its meaning in context were clear.

Tightly defined, a word is a symbol that transfers information about the Universe
 from one entity to an other.

What? Have you heard something that I don't know?

ED: Sorry. How's that ?

Ya wanna stick a carriage return in there somewhere, Milo? Right after the "Universe" would be a good place.

Tightly defined, a word is a symbol that transfers information about the Universe from one entity to an other.

% = Isn't a word, but it is a symbol that fits the above *constraints.

What do we have, so far, to agree on that a "word" is? Is there any thing we can agree on other than what *it isn't? If so, what is that which we can agree *it isn't?

Allow me to rephrase what I meant by a "non-word", as I doubted it would spark up any sort of controversy.

A word, in my book, is any continuous series of letters confined by punctuation or spaces. A real word is one that is found in dictionaries. I'd say that yes, "eoxlibnsdaienvlab" is, by the most strict definition, a word. But it's not a real word. It's never been used in conversation, unless one of you has (somehow) muttered it today or yesterday, it's probably never existed in a sentence until WW did the honor, and no dictionary would even think about accepting it, even under the definition of "a ridiculous series of letters". I guess it just depends on your personal definition of the word "word".

% = Isn't a word, but it is a symbol that fits the above *constraints.
______________________________________________________


Now Musick, stop before you declare truth a democracy,
because Truth doesn't give a whit what we agree upon here.

Agreeing is not the same thing as being right.
But if you don't want % to be a word then so be it.
You can define the term "word" anyway that suits your fancy.

But the establishment of parameters of definitions
that include all referents and exclude all non-referents
of a particular word, including the word "word",
is a necessary precondition to effecting a more-or-less
precise transfer of meaning.

Agreed?

"eoxlibnsdaienvlab" is, by the most strict definition, a word.

Still looking for the definition. I would think that pronounceability and a generally agreed meaning, at least by some subset of the population, would be minimum requirements. "Eoxlibnsdaienvlab" fails on both those crtiteria. %, on the other hand, would seem to me to pass.

I agree with Faldage's analysis of 'eoxlibnsdaienvlab.' Eoxlibnsdaienvlab is a random clustering of letters that may appear to be word-like, possibly even a word from another language, but unlikely so unless I was a very lucky monkey at the keyboard.

Symbols can represent meaningful utterances we readily understand, and it could be argued that letters, too, are symbols representing meaningful utterances. However, I think that symbols are representations of words and not actually words themselves. I would restrict words to being:

meaningful utterances
alphabetical representations of those meaningful utterances

...but only when examining the written language in a search for words. I can write the code: 3-1-19-20 to represent the word cast, but I would not argue that
3-1-19-20 is a word. I would say 3-1-19-20 is a symbolic representation of the word cast.

The entire situation dramatically changes when we examine other languages, such as sign languages that we've discussed here before.

So, in my own consideration of words and language without including sign languages, I would not include symbols, such as %, to be called and recognized as words in and of themselves, but representations of words, such as the word percent. I'm fairly sure that I'll be in the minority here. But so it goes...

Faldage:

ee'-ox-lib-bins-DAY-en-vlab. And from WW's sentence, I deduce it to be an adverb meaning "wistfully". Okay, a subset of the population, albeit a small one, has come up with a pronunciation, and then a meaning. Is it now a word?

I'd say that, although the word it represents is not, "%" is completely unpronounceable. Wouldn't you?

Take my nickname, for example. The only reason it exists is because one day, someone spelled "animal" terribly wrong. AniamL has no agreed pronunciation, although I pronounce it "ahn-ee-AHM-ull". It has no distinct meaning, although the people with whom I have corresponded for the last year or so use it interchangeably with "animal". I don't even think I've seen it spelled correctly more than once or twice on this forum (Dr. Bill may have been the only one), so it might not even have a determined spelling. Is AniamL a word?

Once again, I think it's all based on your own definition of the word "word".

A real word is one that is found in dictionaries.

Oh it was so kind of Dr Johnson to invent words, how did the english language get along before him? all of shakespear, written before the invention of words!

and besides, new words appear all the time, some gain favor, and become part of language, (and then, after some years, are included in dictionaries).

what do we call a collection of letters, with an agreed upon meaning, and general use, before it is a word? (that is, included in a dictionary?)
do you grok what i am saying?

i have no idea when a word becomes a word.. are the collections of letters that exist in the poem jabberwacky words? most are rarely used.. some only used in the poem and no were else. are they words or not?

i think they are... but then, what do i know?

ee'-ox-lib-bins-DAY-en-vlab

Let's see if I've got this straight, Ani. You accept "eoxlibnsdaienvlab" as a word, but not "inciteful".

And % is, as Dub-dub' pointed out above, pronounced per-cent.

It's a good point she made, too, about the difference between words and representations of words, but I think, for purposes of discussion, we can consider the representations of words, whether as strings of characters, arbitrary symbols, or waving about of hands in the air, to be words.

> Dr Bill may have been the only one

nay, my fine Fong greeted you thusly on the day you signed up: "Welcome aBoard, AniamL...", as have no fewer than 6 others - we are an observant crowd of aniamls here :)

No. You don't understand what I'm saying. I'm saying that both, under my strictest rules of "worddom", are, in fact, words, only because they're strings of letters. However, they should absolutely not be considered additions to the English language. The only reason I made up a definition and a pronunciation to that "word" is to refute your statement that if a series of letters has a pronunciation and an understood meaning, then it's a word.

'%' is a word, huh? If I draw a picture of a square on a piece of paper, is that a word? What about an airplane? Are artists and painters therefore fluent in every language on this planet?


Edit: error noted, Mav.

If we are going to include symbols, such as %, in our word list, we should also include pictorial representations of words, such as ideographs and pictographs. Your airplane picture would be included in such a list.

Aha. So a painter, then, paints a picture of a tree. He has written the words tree, bough, branch, twig, trunk, tall, long, bark, striated, rough, brown, green, leaf, vein, serrated, trough, ad infinitum. Perhaps his drawings can be interpreted in several ways. Maybe it's not a tree. Maybe it's someone's house. Add a hundred more words. Consequently, a painter can be completely fluent in every language known to man. Some of the longest literary works in history are just one painting. I could go on and on.

And I still would like to know whether eoxlibnsdaienvlab is a word, now that I have defined it and provided a pronunciation.

Yes, provided that WW, who cooined it, agrees with you that it means wistfully. Word are for communication, and unless there are two or more people who agree on the definition of a bunch of letters that bunch of letters is not a word.

The fact that others don't like it or recognize it as a word is meaningless. Even tsuwm and Anu see collections of letters every day that they do not recognize as words until some other person gives them a frame of reference to know what the words mean. From now on when you tell WW that she is reacting ee'-ox-lib-bins-DAY-en-vlab then she and perhaps others will know what you mean.

Edit: You have the secondary stress on the wrong syllable.

I disagree that assigning meaning to an unkown group of letters for one's own convenience automatically makes the word mean what an individual believes to be its meaning. It is sound and fury again signifying nothing.

If we were to agree that the basis of language lies in communication among people speaking a shared language, 'eoxlibnsdaienvlab' is equivalent to scribbles on a page, a stream of letters stirred chaotically with a stick, a chaotic and random assortment of letters. Because the chaos began with one source without the support of any known intention from the writer, at best we can wonder at the pronunciation and definition, but reach no agreement because there is no known precedent. So we could begin research. Has anyone seen this apparently chaotic arrangement of letters before? Can the meaning be clearly deduced from context? And so on.

But one person's declaration of meaning does not necessarily make it so. At some point there would need to be agreement, and in the case of the sentence I posted there is little chance we would all agree because the word 'eoxlibnsdaienvlab' could be interpreted in many ways, none of which might be generally agreed as intended meaning by any of us here. Most likely, most would agree that the arrangement was random and, finally, meaningless, therefore not a word at all.

However, if we are in agreement that %, a symbolic representation of the word percent, should be included in a list of words (though I disagree on this point), we should also include pictorial representations, such as ideographs. There is historical basis for such inclusions in language, especially considering pictographs used in the earliest of languages before any type of alphabetical representations of languages.

If we discuss English here, by definition a language shared among English-speaking peoples, I would suggest that eoxlibnsdaienvlab cannot be included as an English word because it lacks definition between any two speakers of English. A supposition of its definition by one speaker does not necessarily cement the meaning of this non-word, no matter how hard the cry and insistence. You might read the word lateritious in a sentence about plumbing, and without the aid of a dictionary assert the meaning to be "of pipes," but you would be in error. To see a group of unknown letters and assign immediate, unjustified meaning does not automatically cause those letters to become the meaning you assign. There must be agreement of interpretation of meaning at some point between speakers, and in the case of 'eoxlibnsdaienvlab,' we disagree. I was the writer of the letters and I assure you the lettering was random. I would hope writer's intention would carry some weight in interpreting a language that serves as a means to communicate.

if a series of letters has a pronunciation and an understood meaning, then it's a word.


The key here is understood. TEd has it right here, to be a word, among other qualifications, a significant group of people agree on a meaning.

Conversate is another example. The vast majority of people can rattle on about its not being a word since we have the word converse but if a significant group of people use it to mean something other than converse then there is no valid reason to deny it wordhood.

from WW's sentence, I deduce it to be an adverb meaning "wistfully". Okay, a subset of the population, albeit a small one, has come up with a pronunciation, and then a meaning. Is it now a word?

It is certainly a word inchoate, AnimiaL. Is a fetus human? Is a word inchoate a word?

A word inchoate, like a fetus, may never come full term. It may never enter the language to become a distinct, recognizable entity accepted by a single authoritative dictionary.

But who are the authorities who adjudge a dictionary "authoritative"? And how many authoritative dictionaries must accept a word before it will be invested with sufficient meaning to satisfy the exacting requirements of everyone?

In any case, a word inchoate is a conditional word, or a voidable word. But it is still a word until voided of meaning.

Furthermore, if the 'word' was intended as a communication having a specific meaning, and that meaning was apprehended by any other person, then that 'word' is a genuine word at both ends of the communication, even if there are only two people in the entire world who understand that communication.

No living scholars today can agree on the meaning of all the words in Robert Burn's famous comic-opera tribute to the haggis. Does that mean that some of the words in that poem, namely, the ones in respect of which no two living scholars can agree, are not words?

Were the hieroglyphs something other than words when no-one could read them?

Any combination of letters or symbols bearing purposeful meaning is a word. A word fills a void of meaning. That's unavoidable.

We can argue this fact until we're blue in the face, but we can't separate a word from its meaning or its meaning from the word. They are one and the same.

WW:

Since you said that you don't agree that eoxlibnsdaienvlab means wistfully, there currently exists that series of letters which has meaning to only one person. In that case it isn't a word. But if two or more people make it a word, it is because it can theoretically facilitate communication twixt two people. You'll note that I used the word provided in my prior post.

To go a bit further, some people were discussing whether a picture is a word. Yes and no. In my view a picture of an airplane isn't necessarily a word because is a great deal of ambiguity of what it means. It can mean a particular plane, one with two wings and a tail; it could mean airplanes as a class, whether they have two, four, or even six wings, or whether they are powered by people or by the most advanced engine. Others might also construe it to be the verb to fly. Even others might construe it to be an example of a construct in its most generic terms. Context is important for ideograms of this type, so they remain a form of communication which doesn't achieve word-dom, imho.

But when, as with %, there is a universal agreement that it means divided by 100, then it becomes a word. There is nothing magical in individual letters that can restrict the mind from understanding the concept behind them.

Consider the octothorpe, however. It has several meanings, none of which are so universal as to allow us to look at the # and say interally, "Ah, that means 16 avordupois ounces." In context you can puzzle out its meaning, but not by itself.

Of course this leads to a discussion of, for example, the word lead. By itself you don't know whether it means the long-e verb, the short-e word for the element Pb, the long-e word for leash, or the long-e word for clue. Is lead a word? Of course it is. Which word it is depends on context. Now, why isn't # also a word of differing meanings which must be determined through context?

Suddenly I have a headache and I don't want to continue this line of thought any more!!!!! Translated:I don't know the answer and somehow I wrote myself into this damned corner. ARGH!!

TEd goes away whistling "All I want is a rune somewhere..."

"is it now a word" is to me a very interesting tangent to our main theme. I go back to what I have labeled the "non-word" zzxjoanw. this was seemingly inserted as a joke into a dictionary of musical terms with the literally impossible definition a Maori drum. (this generated a previous thread herein which is eminently searchable and a good exercise for the student :)

zzxjoanw was latterly picked up by unusual word books, notably Mrs. Byrne's, wherein Josefa Heifitz helpfully provides pronunciation (see below). this has all engendered much online raillery (ycliu). one explanation of the joke is that it's a spoof on some Joan W's name.

ziks-jo'an .. [a=schwa]

so, is this non-word a word?

---

then we have what have been labeled ghost words. the best example I have to mind at the moment is "dord". this initially saw the light of day as a typo (typo was prolly not a word at the time) in Webster's Second New Int'l Dictionary (Unab.) this apparently was a typesetter's mistake for the wanted entry "D or d".

see here for a more complete story and the actual entry as it appeared in W2. (this ghost word was removed from W3 except as an example of the entry "ghost word")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dord

here is the W3 entry for those who dont..
: ghost word - an accidental word form never in established usage; especially : one arising from an editorial or typographical error or a mistaken pronunciation (as phantomnation or dord)
Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002.

so, is this ghost-word a word?

NB: W3 classes it as an accidental "word form". this seems to be a useful term for use here.

so, is this non-word a word?

Is this non-word a word?

Need I say more?

>is this non-word a word?

as noted above, the term non-word is my conceit. the question stands for purpose of our discussion.

[EDIT]plutarch, you changed the context of your comment after I replied, without notation; it would be helpful to readers if you would so mark edit when you do this.

the question stands for purpose of our discussion

Perhaps, but the discussion stands without purpose.

Edit: What comes first? The chicken or the egg? The meaning or the word?

This is what I mean, tsuwm. We can go around and around with "What is a word?" forever, and we are always back where we started.

Perhaps, but the discussion stands without a purpose.

For a discussion without purpose, I direct your attention to "Confessions of an Heirhead."

http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=wordplay&Number=135148

ghost word - an accidental word form never in established usage

There is an important principle enshrined here which I think goes to the heart of the matter. We can agree that there are putative or potential words - forms of representation that seem to be possible constructions to carry meaning, even if we know not the meaning yet... but it is not until there is established usage in a speech community that it becomes recognisable as a word. Hence we can all come up with witty coinages that seem to represent a possible transfer of meaning, but it will not be a word until given currency by use.

How large or sustained that community of users needs to be I am happy to leave to OEDipus Rex :)

I am happy to leave to OEDipus Rex :)

Sounds like we're saying the same thing, Maverick.

A word is a word when OEDipus says it is. And it is also a word before OEDipus says it is, if it has some meaning for someone. But it is not a word to anyone if it has no meaning for anyone. In this case, it is a non-word, an unintelligible word, a nonsense word, or a lost word. Perhaps we can all agree about that.

Edit: Perhaps, I will have the last word. Or, perhaps, not.
In any event, "In the beginning was the Word." Before OEDipus. :)

wordlessness

Surely the question is not whether inciteful is a word, but whether it is a correct alphabetical representation of the word meaning "showing great insight"? Many would say that it is not, many would say that it is, and many don't give a toss.

In certain groups, using inciteful in this way will get you branded an ignoramus. In others it will pass without comment. Who are you trying to communicate with, and what do you wish to communicate?

Similarly the % sign is generally accepted as a representation of the words per cent.

Speech comes first. If a group of letters is accepted as a correct representation of speech sounds then it is a "word". If not, not.

If those who claim to be upholding correctness of diction were to truly do so, they would condemn 'inciteful' as a mis-spelling, not by saying, 'there's no such word'.

To take another example, one found on Jackie's grammar test, irregardless is a word in that it is a correct representation of speech sounds, but it is only used in very colloquial situations, not on formal occasions such as writing for the general public. Is this point somehow too difficult for aspiring writers and other schoolchildren to grasp and so they need to be fobbed off with the dismissive, "there's no such word"?

Bingley

many don't give a toss

Many words don't give a toss either, Bingley. But that's because they have no meaning, even as a misspelling. [Incidentally, a misspelled word like "inciteful" has meaning. It means "insightful". It's just that its proper spelling has been misplaced.]

We're using a lot of words to get at the meaning of a word which has no meaning.

What's wrong with tsuwm's solution: "word" and "non-word". Anything in between doesn't really exist because it doesn't mean anything to anyone.

So why not call a word which doesn't have any meaning to anyone, and has never had any meaning to anyone, a mu-word? Or, a "ghost word", as Maverick has suggested? Or why not just call it a non-word, or a non-existent word, and be done with it. :)

OK, I've got one if someone wants to give it a toss.

What do you call a cow that isn't a cow, doesn't look like a cow, has never been represented or acknowledged by anyone at any time as a cow, and has never existed or been misspelled as a cow?

Can anyone think of a word for it? And you can't say mu-cow 'cause that's too easy. :)

On the other hand, inciteful could be a word synonymous with belligerent or provoking, except it violates standard rules of forming words with the -ful suffix. At least, I can't offhand think of any words formed by the formula <verb>ful/i].