[[identifying-words]] == Identifying Words A word in English is relatively simple to spot: words are separated by whitespace or (some) punctuation.((("languages", "identifyig words")))((("words", "identifying"))) Even in English, though, there can be controversy: is _you're_ one word or two? What about _o'clock_, _cooperate_, _half-baked_, or _eyewitness_? Languages like German or Dutch combine individual words to create longer compound words like _Wei?kopfseeadler_ (white-headed sea eagle), but in order to be able to return `Wei?kopfseeadler` as a result for the query `Adler` (eagle), we need to understand how to break up compound words into their constituent parts. Asian languages are even more complex: some have no whitespace between words, sentences, or even paragraphs.((("Asian languages", "identifying words"))) Some words can be represented by a single character, but the same single character, when placed next to other characters, can form just one part of a longer word with a quite different meaning. It should be obvious that there is no silver-bullet analyzer that will miraculously deal with all human languages. Elasticsearch ships with dedicated analyzers for many languages, and more language-specific analyzers are available as plug-ins. However, not all languages have dedicated analyzers, and sometimes you won't even be sure which language(s) you are dealing with. For these situations, we need good standard tools that do a reasonable job regardless of language.