Where does word collide?

In the study of sequences of symbols, a word is a finite string of characters drawn from a fixed set called an alphabet, including the empty string of no characters. Axel Thue's 1906 paper Über unendliche Zeichenreihen (on infinite sequences of symbols) founded the systematic study of such strings, now called combinatorics on words, as Berstel and Perrin's 2007 history records; the same object became the basic unit of formal language theory, where a language is a set of words. Here the referent is an abstract finite string with no fixed length and no meaning attached, not a unit of computer memory, a unit of a spoken language, or a theological principle.[1][2]

Unit

One word is a single finite string over the alphabet, its length being the number of characters

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Described by its length, its characters, and its position within a formal language

Leonard Bloomfield's 1933 book Language defined the word as a minimum free form, the smallest piece of speech that can stand alone as a complete utterance. Later work showed that this criterion is hard to apply consistently across languages, and Haspelmath's 2011 study argues that there is no single cross-linguistic definition of the word, since the phonological, grammatical, and orthographic boundaries need not coincide. Here the referent is a unit of natural human language, defined by how speech is segmented, not a string in mathematics, a unit of computer memory, or a divine principle.[3][4]

Unit

One word is a single minimal free form of a language

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by tests of separability, internal cohesion, and the ability to stand alone

In their 1946 report on the logical design of an electronic computing instrument, Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann described a memory built from fixed-length units, each holding forty binary digits and handled by the machine as a single whole, and the term word became the standard name for such a unit. A machine word is the natural quantity of data a processor moves and operates on at once, and its width, such as 32 or 64 bits, is a basic design parameter of a computer. Here the referent is a fixed-size block of bits in hardware, not a divine principle, an arbitrary string in mathematics, or a unit of a spoken language.[5]

Unit

One word is a fixed-length block of bits, its width set by the processor (for example 32 or 64 bits)

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Given by the word length in bits, a fixed parameter of a computer's design