... fresh rain in a forest in the fall. Certainly a unified concept, but we would not consider the smell of fresh rain in a forest in the fall a word. In fact, English simply has no single word for ... plural of son -in- law is not *son -in- laws but sons -in- law. Under the assumption that son -in- law is one word (i.e. some kind of compound), the plural ending is inserted inside the word and not ... to define what a word is, you might first think of the word as a unit in the writing system, the so-called orthographic word. You could say, for example, that a word is an uninterrupted string...