The concern to be addressed in this chapter is a rather fundamental one: what do we find when we examine the internal form of a word? That is, when we consider the form of a word, what kinds of structure ought it to be taken to have, as a matter of its form? There is a tendency in doing linguistic analysis to assume that any information we can supply about linguistic elements constitutes a kind of “structure” that they have, but this clearly conflates several distinct notions. For instance, in discussing the word rear (as in When Trigger reared suddenly, Roy Rogers fell off), we can note that its source is Middle English reren, Old English rœran; and that its relation to modern English rise constitutes one of the few remaining pairs of English words illustrating Verner's Law. Surely, however, we would not want to say that this information is part of the structure of the word rear in the way that, for example, the organization of its phonological content into segments and syllables surely is. Information about the etymology of a word is properly given in the form of a description of its history and derivation from earlier forms; information about segmental and syllabic structure, on the other hand, is simply one aspect of the form or internal organization of the word itself.