Wikipedia (pronounced /ˌwikiˈpiːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkaɪ'pɛdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪki-/) is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia wiki cluster. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser. The project began on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia has more than 3,180,000 articles, including more than 938,000 in the English-language version, and as of January 2006 it has more than 838,000 registered users. Since its inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity,[1] and its success has spawned several sister projects. There has, however, been controversy over its reliability.
A definition is usually (but does not have to be) a statement of the essential properties of a certain thing, or a statement of equivalence between one expression and another, usually more complex expression that gives the meaning of the first. These two senses are not mutually exclusive, nor are they equivalent.
A thing being defined is called (from Latin) a definiendum; the expressions or words which define it are called a definiens.
A quotation is a fragment of a human expression that has been inserted into another human expression. It is most often a written or oral fragment and in such cases it is also called a quote. This latter type of quotation is almost always taken from literature, though speech transcripts, film dialogues, and song lyrics are also common and valid sources.
A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound.
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In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. Morphemes are, generally, a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful members.
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"Isn't it always amazing how we characterize a person's intelligence by how closely their thinking matches ours?"
~Belgarath
A language is a system of symbols, generally known as lexemes and the rules by which they are manipulated. The word language is also used to refer to the whole phenomenon of language, i.e., the common properties of languages. Language is commonly used for communication, though it has other uses.
Language is a natural phenomenon, and language learning is common in childhood. In their usual form, human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for the symbols in order to communicate with others through the senses. Though there are thousands of human languages, they all share a number of properties from which there are no known deviations. There is no defined line between a language and a dialect, but it is often said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Humans have also constructed other languages, including Esperanto and Klingon, programming languages, and various mathematical formalisms. These languages are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by natural human languages.
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