根据传统智慧，一个单词是可以在字典中找到的任何一组字母。哪本词典？为什么，不明授权词典，当然：

'Is it in the dictionary?' is a formulation suggesting that there is a single lexical authority: "The Dictionary." As the British academic Rosamund Moon has commented, "The dictionary most cited in such cases is the UAD: the Unidentified Authorizing Dictionary, usually referred to as 'the dictionary,' but very occasionally as 'my dictionary.' (Elizabeth Knowles, How to Read a Word. Oxford University Press, 2010)

为了描述这种对“词典”权威的夸大尊重，语言学家约翰·阿尔及奥创造了词典编纂学术语。（试着在你的UAD中查找。）

事实上，一个高度实用的词可能需要几年的时间才能被任何词典正式认定为一个词：

For the Oxford English Dictionary, a neologism requires five years of solid evidence of use for admission. As the new-words editor Fiona McPherson once put it, "We need to be sure that a word has established a reasonable amount of longevity." The editors of the Macquarie Dictionary write in the Introduction to the fourth edition that "to earn a place in the dictionary, a word has to prove that it has some acceptance. That is to say, it has to turn up a number of times in a number of different contexts over a period of time." (Kate Burridge, Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English Language History. HarperCollins Australia, 2011)

那么，如果一个词作为一个词的地位不取决于它在“词典”中的直接出现，它取决于什么？

定义词

正如语言学家Ray Jackendoff所解释的，“一个词之所以成为一个词，是因为它是一段可发音的声音和一个意义之间的配对”（思想和意义用户指南，2012）。换句话说，一个单词和一系列无法理解的声音或字母之间的区别在于——至少对某些人来说——一个单词有某种意义。

如果你更喜欢一个更广阔的答案，请考虑Stephen Mulhall对维特根斯坦哲学研究的阅读（1953）：

[W]hat makes a word a word is not its individual correspondence with an object, or the existence of a technique of its use considered in isolation, or its contrasts with other words, or its suitability as one component of a menu of sentences and speech-acts; it depends in the last analysis upon its taking its place as one element in one of the countless kinds of ways in which creatures like us say and do things with words. Inside that unsurveyable complex context, individual words function without let or hindrance, their ties to specific objects without question; but outside it, they are nothing but breath and ink... (Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard. Oxford University Press, 2001)

或者正如弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫所说：

[Words] are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.