sõnadevaheline

Sõnadevaheline is an Estonian adjective meaning “between words.” It is used to describe phenomena or elements that occur at or across the boundaries of words. The term is formed from the stem sõna (word) and vaheline (between, inter-), and it follows the normal pattern of Estonian adjectives in inflection, i.e., it declines like other -line adjectives.

In linguistic and typographic contexts, sõnadevaheline describes interword phenomena—those that concern what happens at the point where one word ends and the next begins. A common example is the interword space, referred to as the sõnadevaheline tühik, which denotes the space separating words in written text. The concept is also used more broadly to refer to word-boundary features in analyses of sentence structure, typography, and text rendering.

Beyond basic spacing, the term can apply to rules and observations about punctuation, alignment, and line wrapping that relate to the separation of words. In computational linguistics and natural language processing, sõnadevaheline boundaries are relevant for tokenization and parsing, where the correct identification of word boundaries affects downstream processing.

Overall, sõnadevaheline serves as a precise descriptor in Estonian for anything situated between words, most often tied to spacing and other word-boundary considerations in writing, typography, and text analysis.