We now turn our attention from speaker meaning to word meaning. One of the elementary facts about word meaning is that words have different meanings in different languages. The written word “rot” means red in German and decay in English. “Hood” means the engine cover in American English and the top of the car in British English. So we need to say something first about what languages are. As David Lewis (1975) has observed, languages must be distinguished from language. Languages are things like French, German, and English. French is a language, but is not language itself. Language is a human activity, in which languages are used. It includes speech, writing, and other types of symbol use. While linguists and philosophers sometimes debate as to which is primary, it should be clear that languages and language are complementary subjects.

We will first examine what a language is, and then analyze what it is to use one. This will enable us to define what it is for a word to mean something on a given occasion (“applied” word meaning). We will be using “languages” in a very general sense, to denote symbol systems of all kinds, including codes, signal systems, sign languages, and artificial languages. The distinctive features of living, natural languages will be discussed in Chapter 11, culminating in a definition that implicitly defines what it is for a word or other linguistic unit to express or mean something in a living language.