The reader may have noticed that the term ‘word’ has been used in two, or perhaps three, different senses. We said, first of all, that the opening sentence of Yeats's poem:

was made up of seven words, and that each of these was made up of varying numbers of letters or phonemes. Likewise in a line of Latin poetry about a river:

‘It glides past and will continue to glide past, rolling on for all time’ (Horace, Epistles, 1, 2. 43) we will distinguish a seven-letter word labitur ‘[it] glides’, a two-letter word et ‘and’, and so on. The ancient grammarians would already have analysed the line in this way, saying more precisely that labitur was built up of the three syllables la, bi and tur, and that it was these in turn which were built up of the letters l, a, etc. Similarly, the English word country could, in the first instance, be divided phonetically into the syllables [k∧n] and [trI], with stress on the first.