a spoken word or saying: what someone puts into speech
This is a poetic word for speech itself, the actual words that come out of a person's mouth. It belongs almost entirely to the poetry and wisdom books (Job, Psalms, Proverbs), where it usually appears in the plural, sayings, for the things a person says.
Its meaning does not really shift from speaker to speaker; what shifts is who is talking. Sometimes the words are an ordinary person's, sometimes a wise teacher's instruction, and sometimes they are God's own words handed on by a prophet or psalmist. The two senses below sort the occurrences by that simple question, who is speaking, because the weight of the word changes completely when the speaker is God: the same plain term for everyday speech becomes the vehicle for revelation and command.
Because it is a poetic term, it often stands in step with the more common words for speech, where one line says words and the next says speech or mouth, two ways of naming the same thing for the sake of the rhythm.