means A single distinct unit of language, made of sounds or letters, that carries meaning and can stand on its own.

from From Old English 'word,' with relatives spread across the Germanic family — German 'Wort,' Dutch 'woord,' Old Norse 'orð.' Scholars trace it back further to a Proto-Indo-European root '*wer-,' meaning 'to speak' or 'to say,' which is also thought to lie behind Latin 'verbum' (giving us 'verb' and 'verbal') and Greek 'rhetor' (the speaker, root of 'rhetoric'). So the word for 'word' has, fittingly, been spoken in some form for as long as we can reconstruct speech itself.