a spoken word, and by extension the matter it concerns or the command it carries
In the Aramaic chapters of Daniel this one noun does the work of several English words. At its root it is simply a word that is spoken, but it stretches easily to the matter that the word is about and to the command that a word can carry. A single chapter uses it for a king's threat, for the business the wise men cannot explain, and for the boastful speech of a coming ruler.
This is the same wide reach that its Hebrew twin (מִלָּה) has, and above all the same reach as the everyday Hebrew word for "word, thing, matter" (דָּבָר). What looks like three separate ideas in English is one idea in the original: something said, and everything that flows from its being said.
Context, not the word itself, tells a reader which shade is meant. When Nebuchadnezzar warns that "the word is gone from me," the noun leans toward his royal sentence; when Daniel makes known "the matter" the wise men could not, it leans toward the affair at hand; when the little horn "speaks great words" against the Most High, it is plain speech.