signifier -
the phonological or orthographic sound or appearance of a word that can be used to describe or identify something; "the inflected forms of a word can be represented by a stem and a list of inflections to be attached"
word a unit of language that native speakers can identify; "words are the blocks from which sentences are made"; "he hardly said ten words all morning"
linguistics the humanistic study of language and literature
ghost word a word form that has entered the language through the perpetuation of an error
root word,
theme,
radical,
stem,
root,
base a unifying idea that is a recurrent element in literary or artistic work; "it was the usual `boy gets girl' theme"
etymon,
root a simple form inferred as the common basis from which related words in several languages can be derived by linguistic processes
