As the ontology of words has begun to attract more attention and has increased in publications in recent years, there is a clear need for more significant interdisciplinary contact between work in the philosophy of language and ontology and lexical studies and morphology. One area that particularly needs improvement is how words are defined in the philosophical literature. The issues that arise therein can be seen in the common but, in many ways, problematic appeals to lexemes as explicanda and in the complete absence of any discussion of lexicalization, despite clear interest in the phenomenon of word formation or creation.This talk aims to outline a novel account of words to address these deficits and improve the state of the art. The proposal is to introduce a variation of the notion of the grammatical word that has seen development in lexical studies and to condition it on lexicalization processes. The resulting account avoids appeals to lexemes, and the novel inclusion of lexicalization positions it to engage with crucial issues like instantiation and word formation, bringing together the philosophy of language, linguistics, and ontology. Whereas this is intended to bear on the ontology of words, it also sheds light more generally on the word as a fundamental type of expression and its place within natural language.