> antidisestablishmentarianism This is not actually a compound word, merely a word which stacks several layers of derivation on top of a single stem. > What a

> antidisestablishmentarianism This is not actually a compound word, merely a word which stacks several layers of derivation on top of a single stem. > What about single nouns with spaces in the middle like "remote control" or "mobile phone")? These are compound words, identical in their nature to the stereotypical long German compound words, regardless of the fact that they're written with a space in the middle. The difference is merely orthographical. > When I fist was interested in NLP, I thought "word" was easily defined as "sequence of letters bounded by non-letters". There's an additional problem with this view which you didn't mention, which is that written language is merely one possible encoding of the actual underlying language, which is not merely a theoretical concern, but also a practical one. After all, even in English the encoding is far from 1-to-1, since you have multiple differing spellings for what would generally be considered to be the same word (e.g. "color" and "colour"), as well as identical sequences of letters which would generally be considered to be different words (e.g. "lead" and "lead").