Editing Word (section)

===Orthography===
[[File:Happy Valentines Day.jpg|thumbnail|Words made out of letters, divided by spaces]]
In languages with a [[writing|literary tradition]], the question of what is considered a single word is influenced by [[orthography]]. [[Word separator]]s, typically [[space (punctuation)|spaces]] and [[punctuation mark]]s are common in modern orthography of languages using [[alphabetic script]]s, but these are a relatively modern development in the [[history of writing]]. In [[character encoding]], [[text segmentation#Word segmentation|word segmentation]] depends on which [[character (computing)|characters]] are defined as word dividers. In [[English orthography]], [[compound (linguistics)|compound expressions]] may contain spaces. For example, ''ice cream'', ''air raid shelter'' and ''get up'' each are generally considered to consist of more than one word (as each of the components are free forms, with the possible exception of ''get''), and so is ''no one'', but the similarly compounded ''someone'' and ''nobody'' are considered single words.

Sometimes, languages which are close grammatically will consider the same order of words in different ways. For example, [[reflexive verb]]s in the [[French language|French]] infinitive are separate from their respective particle, e.g. ''se laver'' ("to wash oneself"), whereas in [[Portuguese language|Portuguese]] they are hyphenated, e.g. ''lavar-se'', and in [[Spanish language|Spanish]] they are joined, e.g. ''lavarse''.{{efn|The convention also depends on the tense or mood—the examples given here are in the infinitive, whereas French imperatives, for example, are hyphenated, e.g. ''lavez-vous'', whereas the Spanish present tense is completely separate, e.g. ''me lavo''.}}

Not all languages delimit words expressly. [[Mandarin Chinese]] is a highly [[analytic language]] with few inflectional affixes, making it unnecessary to delimit words orthographically. However, there are many multiple-morpheme compounds in Mandarin, as well as a variety of bound morphemes that make it difficult to clearly determine what constitutes a word.<ref name=Fasold2006>{{Cite book |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/62532880 |title=An introduction to language and linguistics |date=2006 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |others=Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton |isbn=978-0-521-84768-1 |location=Cambridge, UK |oclc=62532880}}</ref>{{rp|56}} [[Japanese language|Japanese]] uses orthographic cues to delimit words, such as switching between [[kanji]] (characters borrowed from Chinese writing) and the two [[kana]] syllabaries. This is a fairly soft rule, because [[content word]]s can also be written in [[hiragana]] for effect, though if done extensively spaces are typically added to maintain legibility. [[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]] orthography, although using the [[Latin alphabet]], delimits monosyllabic morphemes rather than words.