  It's instructive to consider what our paradigm of a type is—a word. It will reveal how complicated the identity conditions are for even one specific type, and help to dispel the idea that tokens are to types as cookies are to cookie cutters. It will also show what we desire from a theory of types, by exhibiting the facts that a theory of types has to accommodate. We illustrated the type-token distinction by appealing to words, so presumably we think we know at least roughly what a word type is. Unfortunately, everyone seems to think they know, but there is massive disagreement on the matter in philosophy. However, as urged in the preceding paragraph, it is crucial to rely on linguistics when we consider what a word is. When we do we find that there are different linguistic criteria for what a word is, and a good deal of the disagreement can be chalked up to this fact.  McArthur 1992's The Oxford Companion to the English Language (pp. 1120-1) lists eight: orthographic, phonological, morphological, lexical, grammatical, onomastic, lexicographical and statistical— but adds that more can be demarcated. There are different types of types of words. However deserving of attention each of these is, it will be useful to focus on just one, and I will do so in what follows. There is an important and very common use of the word ‘word’ that lexicographers and the rest of us use frequently. It is, roughly, the sort of thing that merits a dictionary entry. (Roughly, because some entries in the dictionary, e.g.,‘il-,’ ‘-ile,’ and ‘metric system,’ are not words, and some words, e.g. many proper names, do not get a dictionary entry.) This notion was at play in our opening remarks in §2 about Shakespeare's vocabulary containing 30,000 words, and the twenty spellings and eighteen senses of the noun ‘color’/’colour’, the verb ‘color’/’colour’, and four current pronunciations of the noun ‘schedule’. These examples show (in this ordinary sense of ‘word’) that the same word can be written or spoken, can have more than one correct spelling, can have more than one correct spelling at the same time, can have more than one sense at the same time and can have more than one correct pronunciation at the same time. It also shows that different words can have the same correct spelling and pronunciation; further obvious examples would show that different words can have the same sense—e.g. English ‘red’ and French ‘rouge’. A theory of types, or of word types, that cannot accommodate this notion of a word is worthless. In what follows, I shall use ‘word’ in this sense.