All articles starting with W
11,426 articles
Word error rate
Word error rate (WER) is the standard metric for evaluating automatic speech recognition systems, counting substitutions, deletions, and insertions against a reference transcript, with lower scores being better.
Word formation
Word formation is the branch of morphology studying how languages create new words via derivation, compounding, conversion, blending, clipping, and borrowing, with productivity and constraints as central measurable notions.
Word Is Out
Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, a 1977 documentary by the Mariposa Film Group (Peter and Nancy Adair, Rob Epstein and others), the first feature documentary about gay people by gay people, with 26 interviewees aged 18 to 77, restored by UCLA in 2008.
Word mark (computing)
A word mark is an extra bit stored with each character in IBM 1401 core memory, marking the high-order end of variable-length data fields and instructions.
Word of Faith
Word of Faith, also called the Word-Faith or Positive Confession movement, is a Pentecostal teaching that spoken faith releases healing and prosperity secured in Christ's atonement.
Word of Honor (山河令) (TV series)
Word of Honor (山河令) is a 2021 Chinese 36-episode wuxia streaming series adapted from Priest's novel Faraway Wanderers, starring Zhang Zhehan and Gong Jun, which scored 8.6 on Douban and spread to over 190 countries and regions.
Word of mouth
Word of mouth: person-to-person spoken transmission of information, central to marketing (five sharing functions, eWOM, free vs paid WOM) and to oral tradition, which carries folklore and survival knowledge across generations without writing.
Word of the year
Word of the year (WOTY): an annual selection by dictionary publishers and language societies of a term reflecting a year's mood. Began in Germany 1971; English versions run by ADS, Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, Collins, Dictionary.com.
Word order
Word order: the typological ordering of subject, verb, and object in clauses. SOV and SVO dominate (about 45% and 42% of languages); explained via dependency locality, historical change, and, recently, data-driven biases in language models.
Word Party
Word Party is a Jim Henson Company CG-animated Netflix preschool series (2016–2021, five seasons, 60 episodes) created by Alex Rockwell, featuring baby animals Bailey, Franny, Kip, Lulu, and later Tilly, teaching vocabulary and Mandarin through digital puppetry.
Word play
Word play: deliberate manipulation of words or speech sounds for effect, from puns, anagrams, palindromes, and lipograms to Scrabble, crosswords, and Wordle; ancient practice, now a multi-billion-dollar digital puzzle industry.
Word problem (mathematics)
In mathematics, a word problem is either a story-like verbal problem solved by applying operations to given numbers, or a decision problem in algebra and computability theory.
Word processor
A word processor is a software application for creating, editing, and formatting text documents, descended from the typewriter and a defining personal computer application by the 1980s.
Word recognition task
A word recognition task is an experimental psychology paradigm measuring lexical access, dominated by naming, reading a word aloud, and lexical decision, judging whether a letter string is a word.
Word salad
Word salad (schizophasia): severely disorganized, incomprehensible speech, the extreme end of formal thought disorder, seen mainly in schizophrenia but also in mania, drug intoxication, and organic brain disorders; quantified by speech-connectedness measures.
Word segmentation
Word segmentation is the task of dividing running text into words for languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Thai, whose writing systems do not mark word boundaries with spaces.
Word stem completion task
The word stem completion task is a memory paradigm in which participants study words and later complete three-letter stems, measuring implicit priming that persists in amnesia.
Word Up! (song)
"Word Up!" is Cameo's 1986 funk hit written and produced by Larry Blackmon and Tomi Jenkins: No. 6 Hot 100, three weeks No. 1 R&B, UK No. 3, transistor-radio vocals, Morricone-echoing keyboard line, covered by Gun, Melanie B, and Korn.
Word-sense disambiguation
Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the natural language processing task of deciding which meaning of an ambiguous word is intended in context, using a sense inventory.
Word2vec
Word2vec is a family of neural network methods introduced by Tomas Mikolov and colleagues at Google in 2013 that learns word embeddings from large amounts of plain text.
WordGirl
WordGirl (2007–2015) is a PBS Kids animated series created by Dorothea Gillim and produced by Scholastic Media's Soup2Nuts, about alien fifth-grader Becky Botsford, who fights Fair City villains with Captain Huggy Face while teaching four vocabulary words per episode.
Wordie Ice Shelf
Wordie Ice Shelf, former ice shelf in Marguerite Bay, west Antarctic Peninsula, named for James M. Wordie; peaked near 2,200 km2 in 1966, retreated from 1966, and vanished by about 2004, leaving Wordie Bay.
Wordle
Wordle: daily online word puzzle by Josh Wardle (January 2021), six guesses at a five-letter word with colored-tile feedback; sold to The New York Times in 2022 for low seven figures.
Wordless novel
Wordless novel: a narrative genre telling stories through sequences of captionless pictures, also called woodcut novel. Begun with Frans Masereel's 1918 25 Images de la passion d'un homme; flourished in the 1920s-1930s, rooted in German Expressionism, shaped by silent cinema, and a forerunner of the graphic novel.
WordNet
WordNet is a large lexical database of English, begun in the mid-1980s at Princeton University under George A. Miller, grouping words into synonym sets called synsets.
WordPad
WordPad was a basic word processor included with Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onward, supporting rich text (.rtf) formatting and removed from Windows 11 in 2024.
WordPerfect
WordPerfect is a word-processing program, now sold by Corel as WordPerfect Office, that dominated DOS-era word processing and remains used in law offices, known for its Reveal Codes feature.
WordPiece
WordPiece is a subword tokenization algorithm that splits words into pieces marked with a ## prefix, introduced at Google in 2012 and best known as the tokenizer of BERT.
WordPress
WordPress is an open-source content management system forked from b2 in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, now powering more than 40% of all websites.
WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a commercial, hosted website-building and blogging service operated by Automattic, launched in 2005, which provides managed hosting built on the open-source WordPress software.