What is a word?Most non-linguists would say that a word is the smallest chunk of meaningful language, a unit made up only of individually meaningless sounds (if spoken) or letters (if written). Certainly , most linguists would agree that phonemes ( speech sounds, introduced in A1) and graphemes (written letters) in themselves usually do not have a meaning : the phonemes /t/,/a/,the diphthong /ai/,the cluster /t/,the grapheme ’g’ , and the digraphs (two- letter groups) ‘th’ and ‘gh’ are meaningless in isolation. However, there are many words in this paragraph that are not neatly unitary. For example , the word ‘themselves’ seems to be made up of two smaller words ‘them’ + ‘selves’- here, the two composite words are proper words in their own right. ‘Certainly’ , though, seems to be made up of a word in its own right (‘certain’) and another odd addition (‘-ly’) that cannot really stand on its own.