Word meaning has played a somewhat marginal role in early contemporaryphilosophy of language, which focused more on the compositionalprocesses whereby words combine to form meaningful sentences, ratherthan on their individual meanings (see the entry on compositionality). Nowadays, there is widespread consensus that the study of wordmeaning is crucial to our understanding of human language. This entryprovides an overview of the way issues related to word meaning havebeen explored in analytic philosophy and a summary of relevantresearch on the subject in neighboring domains. Though the main focuswill be on philosophical problems, contributions from linguistics,psychology, and neuroscience will also be considered.