# words (language)

sounds that are meaning

- Computed level: L10 (depth in the emergence graph, not abstraction)
- Status: review  ·  Domain: word  ·  Arena: word

## Emergence
**Emerges from:** [sound](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-sound.auditory), [meaning](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-meaning.significance)

**Through:** Sounds together meaning are words

**Novel properties:**
- symbolic communication
- discrete linguistic units

## Examples
- In 2023, a child in Nairobi uttered 'milk' to request a drink, linking sound to meaning. *(everyday life)*
- The Rosetta Stone's repeated inscriptions allowed 19th-century scholars to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs as language. *(history)*
- A 2017 Google Translate update mapped neural network outputs to phoneme sequences in real-time speech translation. *(computing)*

## Used by
- [concise](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-concise.linguistic) (L11)
- [song](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-song.musical) (L11)
- [terms](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-terms.language) (L11)
- [the compression claim](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-compression-claim.assertion) (L12)
- [the three tiers](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-three-tiers.structure) (L19)

---
*Canonical: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-words.language*  
*Structured data: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-words.language.json*  
*Every definition provably resolves to space, time, energy and pattern.*