“A Word’s Meaning” was written by author and professor Gloria Naylor to educate others about how and why a word can come to have different interpretations. Naylor gives examples of the various spoken meanings of the word “nigger” to support her claim. She describes different situations in her life where the word was spoken by different people in different situations in different ways, and she delineates how all these shape the meaning of a word that is seen as taboo in the English language. She uses these examples to prove her point that a word does not have any concrete meaning. Naylor explains - in a very intellectual way - the meaning of the word, as if it were a dictionary definition. Paragraph by paragraph, she “defines” the word “nigger”: