Word (linguistics) in the context of "Semantic change"

A phonogram or phonograph (from Ancient Greek phōnḗ 'sound' + grắphō 'writing') is a basic unit of writing (or grapheme) that represents a sound used when speaking a particular language, like a phoneme or syllable. For example, in the English word high, ⟨igh⟩ is a grapheme representing the phoneme /aɪ/—while ⟨igh⟩ is written using three letters potentially treated as distinct in other contexts, they cannot be analyzed separately in this case, as the intended sound is only indicated when read as a single unit. While the word phoneme refers to the sound itself, phonogram instead refers to the written representation of the sound.

A writing system that consists of phonograms shows phonography, and can be called phonographic. Phonograms are contrasted with logograms, graphemes that represent units of meaning like words, morphemes, and determinatives (silent characters used to mark semantic categories).

In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq.

Except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.

A hybrid word or hybridism is a word that etymologically derives from at least two languages. Such words are a type of macaronic language.

A bilingual dictionary or translation dictionary is a specialized dictionary used to translate words or phrases from one language to another. Bilingual dictionaries can be unidirectional, meaning that they list the meanings of words of one language in another, or can be bidirectional, allowing translation to and from both languages. Bidirectional bilingual dictionaries usually consist of two sections, each listing words and phrases of one language along with their translation. In addition to the translation, a bilingual dictionary usually indicates the part of speech, gender, verb type, declension model and other grammatical clues to help a non-native speaker use the word. Other features sometimes present in bilingual dictionaries are lists of phrases, usage and style guides, verb tables, maps and grammar references. In contrast to the bilingual dictionary, a monolingual dictionary defines words and phrases instead of translating them.

Consonant mutation is change in a consonant in a word according to its morphological or syntactic environment.

Mutation occurs in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of all modern Celtic languages. Initial consonant mutation is also found in Indonesian or Malay, in Nivkh, in Southern Paiute and in several West African languages such as Fula. The Nilotic language Dholuo, spoken in Kenya, shows mutation of stem-final consonants, as does English to a small extent. Mutation of initial, medial and final consonants is found in Modern Hebrew. Also, Japanese exhibits word medial consonant mutation involving voicing, rendaku, in many compounds. Uralic languages like Finnish show consonant gradation, a type of consonant mutation.