  The advantage of starting with (iii) is that if there is some nontrivial property that all tokens of a word (in the sense indicated) have in common, then perhaps we can use it to individuate the tokens, and also to get a handle on what the type is like and on how we know what the type is like. Unfortunately, it is not spelling, contrary to what many philosophers seem to think. Stebbing, e.g., considers the inscribed word a shape. But not even the linguist's much narrower notion of an orthographic word (‘a visual sign with a space around it’) requires a canonical spelling. We have seen that not all tokens of ‘color’ have the same spelling, even when they are spelled correctly, which they sometimes are not. Not all tokens are spelled at all—spoken tokens are not. Moreover, two words can have the same spelling, as the noun ‘color’ and verb ‘color’ prove, or to take a different example, the noun ‘down’ from German meaning “the fine soft covering of fowls” and the different noun ‘down’ from Celtic meaning "open expanse of elevated land". (They are not the same word with two senses, but different words with different etymologies.)  Notice that even if, contrary to fact, all tokens of a word had the same spelling and we concluded that the word type itself just is the sequence of letter types that compose it, we would have analyzed word types in terms of letter types, but since we are wondering what types are in the first place, we would still need an account of what letters are since they are types too. Providing one is surprisingly difficult.  Letters of the alphabet such as the letter ‘A’ are not just shapes, for example, contrary to what is implicit in Stebbing 1935 and more explicit in Goodman and Quine 1947, because Braille and Morse code tokens of the letter ‘A’ cannot be said to have “the same shape”, and even standard inscriptions of the letter ‘A’ do not have the same shape—in either a Euclidean or a topological sense—as these examples obtained from a few minutes in the library illustrate: