| search and rescue mission | a rescue mission to search for survivors and to rescue them |
word division
hyphenation | division of a word especially at the end of a line on a page |
| word game | any game involving the formation or alteration or discovery of words |
| word play | playing on words or speech sounds |
| search | an investigation seeking answers, a thorough search of the ledgers revealed nothing, the outcome justified the search |
| search | boarding and inspecting a ship on the high seas, right of search |
| whole-word method | teaching reading by training beginners to associate printed words with spoken words |
search
hunt hunting | the activity of looking thoroughly in order to find something or someone |
| strip search | searching someone for concealed weapons or illegal drugs by having them remove their clothes |
| search mission | a mission to discover something |
| search and destroy mission | an operation developed for United States troops in Vietnam, troops would move through a designated area destroying troops as they found them |
verbolatry
grammatolatry
word-worship | the worship of words |
| air search radar | a shipboard radar that searches for aircraft |
| surface search radar | a naval radar to search for surface targets |
chic
chicness
chichi
modishness
smartness
stylishness
swank
last word | elegance by virtue of being fashionable |
| freedom from search and seizure | a right guaranteed by the th amendment to the US Constitution |
| right of search | the right of a belligerent to stop neutral ships on the high seas in wartime and search them |
hairsplitting
word-splitting | making too fine distinctions of little importance, they didn't take his hairsplitting seriously |
| search | the examination of alternative hypotheses, his search for a move that would avoid checkmate was unsuccessful |
morphology sound structure
syllable structure
word structure | the admissible arrangement of sounds in words |
| words | language that is spoken or written, he has a gift for words, she put her thoughts into words |
| word | a unit of language that native speakers can identify, words are the blocks from which sentences are made, he hardly said ten words all morning |
antonym
opposite word
opposite | a word that expresses a meaning opposed to the meaning of another word, in which case the two words are antonyms of each other, to him the antonym of `gay' was `depressed' |
blend
portmanteau word
portmanteau | a new word formed by joining two others and combining their meanings, `smog' is a blend of `smoke' and `fog', `motel' is a portmanteau word made by combining `motor' and `hotel', `brunch' is a well-known portmanteau |
cognate
cognate word | a word is cognate with another if both derive from the same word in an ancestral language |
content word
openlass word | a word to which an independent meaning can be assigned |
deictic
deictic word | a word specifying identity or spatial or temporal location from the perspective of a speaker or hearer in the context in which the communication occurs, words that introduce particulars of the speaker's and hearer's shared cognitive field into the message- R.Rommetveit |
| dirty word | a word that is considered to be unmentionable, `failure' is a dirty word to him |
form
word form
signifier
descriptor | the phonological or orthographic sound or appearance of a word that can be used to describe or identify something, the inflected forms of a word can be represented by a stem and a list of inflections to be attached |
four-letter word
four-letter Anglo-Saxon word | any of several short English words (often having letters) generally regarded as obscene or offensive |
function word
closedlass word | a word that is uninflected and serves a grammatical function but has little identifiable meaning |
guide word
guideword
catchword | a word printed at the top of the page of a dictionary or other reference book to indicate the first or last item on that page |
| head head word | (grammar) the word in a grammatical constituent that plays the same grammatical role as the whole constituent |
| headword head word | a content word that can be qualified by a modifier |
hypernym
superordinate
superordinate word | a word that is more generic than a given word |
hyponym
subordinate
subordinate word | a word that is more specific than a given word |
| key word | a significant word used in indexing or cataloging |
monosyllable
monosyllabic word | a word or utterance of one syllable |
nonce word
hapax legomenon | a word with a special meaning used for a special occasion |
| ghost word | a word form that has entered the language through the perpetuation of an error |
root
root word
base
stem theme radical | (linguistics) the form of a word after all affixes are removed, thematic vowels are part of the stem |
citation form
main entry word
entry word | the form of a word that heads a lexical entry and is alphabetized in a dictionary |
polysemant
polysemantic word
polysemous word | a word having more than one meaning |
polysyllable
polysyllabic word | a word of more than three syllables |
synonym
equivalent word | two words that can be interchanged in a context are said to be synonymous relative to that context |
vocable
spoken word | a word that is spoken aloud |
part of speech
form class
word class | one of the traditional categories of words intended to reflect their functions in a grammatical context |
| written word | the written form of a word, while the spoken word stands for something, the written word stands for something that stands for something, a craftsman of the written word |
| word order | the order of words in a text |
| last word | an authoritative statement, my doctor has the last word on the medicines I take |