ISO 24614-1:2010 presents the basic concepts and general principles of word segmentation, and provides language-independent guidelines to enable written texts to be segmented, in a reliable and reproducible manner, into word segmentation units (WSU). The many applications and fields that need to segment texts into words — and thus to which ISO 24614-1:2010 can be applied — include translation, content management, speech technologies, computational linguistics and lexicography.