word division
- noun
- /wɜrd dɪˈvɪʒən/
- Specialized
:
división de palabras
- The teacher explained that word division helps readers understand where one word ends and another begins.
Examples
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John Lennard argues that typography, spelling, punctuation, and word division contribute to a text's meaning and should not be regarded as mere accidental features of a text.
Academic text (2006) -
For clarity, you should use proper word division when typing documents to avoid confusion.
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Word division seems to have come back in Ireland in the eighth century of our era, in a context in which Latin was not a vernacular.
Academic text (2001) -
Such syllabaries could, in principle, be used to write any Japanese word, but marking word divisions is not practiced (except for beginners).
Academic text (2001) -
When the Romans adapted the Etruscan alphabet (itself adapted from the Greek) to write Latin, they did, by contrast, commonly mark word divisions by points, but later abandoned this and followed the Greek practice of scriptio continua.
Academic text (2001) -
In this poem, the author uses word division to create a unique visual style on the page.
Synonyms
1
4.3
Dividing a word at the end of a line by using a small dash
The act of dividing words into parts that each have one vowel sound
Dividing words into parts called syllables
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'the separation of a word into parts' follows directly from combining 'word' (a unit of language) with 'division' (the act or process of separating). This is a straightforward, compositional noun–noun construction common in many languages and in typographic contexts, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Word division comes from old printers who split a long word with a hyphen so part stayed at the end of one line and the rest moved to the next. That's why the idea of a division of a word means 'separating a word into parts'.