When focusing on the linguistic study of the periods when variation affects the word, it is essential to conceptualize this unit. Considering that the subject gains in being re-examined in the scope of a given language (in this case, Portuguese), in the ?rst part of the article I have analysed the criteria that are usually retained or that are considered relevant to de?ne 'word': the prosodic level is mentioned as not being discarded but also not being able to provide decisive criteria (1.1);

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... e de?nitions of Bloom?eld (1.2) and Meillet (1.3) are discussed; the effectiveness of the criteria of impossibility of insertion is evaluated (1.4), the future and the conditional are taken into account (1.4.1) and also the –mente adverbs (1.4.2). Then, the diachrony is questioned (1.5). It is considered that in the relationship between Portuguese and Latin regarding the vocable, three drifts can be observed: the permanence of the lexical vocable (1.5.1) which, at the phonological level, is impervious to context, which certi?es the mobility of the word (1.5.1.1); the consolidation of the contextual allomorphy of o, article and pronoun, and of other dependent morphemes (1.5.2), and the lapse of the functional words, partly replaced by multi-word expressions in which grammaticalization frequently occurs and in which different kinds of gradations are noticed. In the second part, it is inquired into the projection of the contents previously de?ned on the texts of the grammarians and the orthographers of the 16th century: after the description of the corpus and the synthesis of the computer processing (2.1), the outline of the path from the graphic word to the word itself is drawn and the methodological principles which have been applied were exposed (2.2). Different kinds of delimitations are reviewed (2.2.1): breaks (2.2.1.1); simple unions (2.2.1.2); unions with elision and contraction (2.2.1.3), followed by the description of the introduction and the use of the apostrophe (2.2.1.4) and the hyphen (2.2.15). In the third part [...]