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.
