{
  "id": "words.language",
  "term": "words",
  "sense": "language",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 10,
  "arena": "word",
  "domain": "word",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "sounds that are meaning",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "sound.auditory",
      "meaning.significance"
    ],
    "interaction": "Sounds together meaning are words",
    "novel_properties": [
      "symbolic communication",
      "discrete linguistic units"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "In 2023, a child in Nairobi uttered 'milk' to request a drink, linking sound to meaning.",
      "domain": "everyday life"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Rosetta Stone's repeated inscriptions allowed 19th-century scholars to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs as language.",
      "domain": "history"
    },
    {
      "text": "A 2017 Google Translate update mapped neural network outputs to phoneme sequences in real-time speech translation.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "language.communication",
      "note": "",
      "type": "is-a"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "concise.linguistic",
    "song.musical",
    "terms.language",
    "the-compression-claim.assertion",
    "the-three-tiers.structure"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "word",
    "words"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-words.language"
}