word

In normal "computerese", the piece of data of the size most efficiently handled by your computer, typically 32 bits or so, give or take a few powers of 2. In Perl culture, it more often refers to an alphanumeric "identifier" (including underscores), or to a string of nonwhitespace characters bounded by whitespace or string boundaries.

A character string or a bit string considered to be an entity for some purpose. Note: In telegraph communications, six character intervals are defined as a word when computing traffic capacity in words per minute, which is computed by multiplying the data signaling rate in baud by 10 and dividing the resulting product by the number of unit intervals per character.