Word searching for meaning

The article presents comparative analysis of word understanding and its meaning in nominalism and philosophic realism. The author shows that philosophic formalism and neopositivism are limited and focused only on the word structure and its outer form. The article criticizes structural ideas of symbolic meaning decoding in language structures and postmodernist ideas negating the meaning-bearing functions of a word. The author considers word understanding in hermeneutics and in symbolic conception of word by A.F. Losev.