words or speech: what a person says, whether a single utterance or a whole line of argument
This is the poetic word for a spoken word, and it is a favorite of the book of Job, which accounts for all but a handful of its uses. Wherever Job and his friends trade arguments, listen to one another, and answer back, this is the word for the words they are exchanging. It works much like the ordinary Hebrew word for word or matter, but it belongs to raised, poetic language rather than everyday conversation.
Its range runs from a single thing said to a whole speech. In some verses it is one utterance on the tongue, as when a psalmist says God knows a word before it is spoken. More often it is speech taken as a whole: an argument to be weighed, a case to be answered, a flow of talk that can be multiplied, cut short, or found empty. English usually renders it word, words, or speech depending on which shade the verse needs.
One verse stretches it further. When Job says he has become the talk of those who scorn him, the same word names not what he says but what others keep saying about him: a byword, the subject of their mockery.
The word has a close cousin in Aramaic, where a nearly identical term is the everyday word for a word, and also for a matter or affair. In Hebrew it stays with speech, and its heavy concentration in poetry gives it a formal, weighty feel that plain prose does not carry.