Word (bookstore)

The Word bookstore was formerly a chain of nineteen Christian bookstores in Australia, plus telephone, internet and mail order. In May 2015, Word announced the closure of its retail bookstores, continuing as an online-only business.

Word Australia is the wholesale distribution arm of Word, meaning that a number of Word's smaller competitors are re-sellers of Word merchandise.

History

The Gospel Film Ministry Ltd was founded in the 1940s by Raymond Moulton as a family-run not-for-profit evangelistic Christian ministry showing films and preaching the gospel. In the 1950s it expanded to distributing music, and established the Word retail chain in the 1970s. In July 2004, Word bought the seven Keswick bookshops in Victoria (giving it 14 shops in total). In 2004 and 2005 new stores were opened in Adelaide (SA) and Alderley (Queensland). In 2007, Word took over the Bible Society Bookshop in Lilydale, Vic, and opened a store at Sunshine in Melbourne’s western suburbs. As Word had historically been largely Victorian-based, an attempt was made to increase its Sydney presence in 2006 by opening a shop in Angel Place in the Sydney CBD. However, that shop closed and another Sydney shop was opened in West Pennant Hills, strategically close to the large Pentecostal church, Hillsong.

Word

In linguistics, a word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed). A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s, red-ness, quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board, rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (He threw a rock too, but he missed).

The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word, or sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols called graphemes, such as the letters of the English alphabet.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a word processor developed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), Apple Macintosh running Mac OS (1985), AT&T Unix PC (1985), Atari ST (1988), OS/2 (1989), Microsoft Windows (1989) and SCO Unix (1994). Commercial versions of Word are licensed as a standalone product or as a component of Microsoft Office, Windows RT or the discontinued Microsoft Works suite. Microsoft Word Viewer and Office Online are Freeware editions of Word with limited features.

History

Origins and growth

In 1981, Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi, the primary developer of Bravo, the first GUI word processor, which was developed at Xerox PARC. Simonyi started work on a word processor called Multi-Tool Word and soon hired Richard Brodie, a former Xerox intern, who became the primary software engineer.

Microsoft announced Multi-Tool Word for Xenix and MS-DOS in 1983. Its name was soon simplified to Microsoft Word. Free demonstration copies of the application were bundled with the November 1983 issue of PC World, making it the first to be distributed on-disk with a magazine. That year Microsoft demonstrated Word running on Windows.

String (computer science)

In computer programming, a string is traditionally a sequence of characters, either as a literal constant or as some kind of variable. The latter may allow its elements to be mutated and the length changed, or it may be fixed (after creation). A string is generally understood as a data type and is often implemented as an array of bytes (or words) that stores a sequence of elements, typically characters, using some character encoding. A string may also denote more general arrays or other sequence (or list) data types and structures.

Depending on programming language and precise data type used, a variable declared to be a string may either cause storage in memory to be statically allocated for a predetermined maximum length or employ dynamic allocation to allow it to hold variable number of elements.

When a string appears literally in source code, it is known as a string literal or an anonymous string.

In formal languages, which are used in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, a string is a finite sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set called an alphabet.