The lexical items in a language are both the single words (vocabulary) and sets of words organized into groups, units or "chunks". Some examples of lexical items from English are "cat", "traffic light", "take care of", "by the way", and "don't count your chickens before they hatch". A vocabulary is a set of words known to a person or other entity, or that are part of a specific language. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
The entire store of lexical items in a language is called its lexis. In linguistics, the lexis of a language is the entire store of its lexical items. ...
Most lexicalitems can be assigned a unique syntactic role solely on the basis of their first character, called the marking character; this role is then sufficient to enable a parser to construct the syntactic form of the KIF expression.
The job of a lexical analyser is to divide the input character stream into a stream of non-overlapping lexicalitems, separated by characters.
A word is any lexicalitem that does not start with a marking character (though it may include them.) Numerals should not be used as words, to avoid confusion with their use in ontologies which refer to numbers.