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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?
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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.
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> 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 :)
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journeyman
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journeyman
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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. 
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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.
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journeyman
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journeyman
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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.
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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.
TEd
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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.
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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.
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veteran
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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.
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