 The notions of word and word meaning are problematic to pin down, and this is reflected in the difficulties one encounters in defining the basic terminology of lexical semantics. In part, this depends on the fact that the term ‘word’ itself is highly polysemous (see, e.g., Matthews 1991; Booij 2007; Lieber 2010). For example, in ordinary parlance ‘word’ is ambiguous between a type-level reading (as in “Color and colour are spellings of the same word”), an occurrence-level reading (as in “there are thirteen words in the tongue-twister How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”), and a token-level reading (as in “John erased the last two words on the blackboard”). Before proceeding further, let us then elucidate the notion of word in more detail  (Section 1.1),  and lay out the key questions that will guide our discussion of word meaning in the rest of the entry  (Section 1.2).