This paper synthesizes a wide range of literature from sociolinguistics and cognitive psychology, to argue for a central role for the “word” as a vehicle of language variation and change. Three crucially interlinked strands of research are reviewed—the role of context in associative learning, the word-level storage of phonetic and contextual detail, and the phonetic consequences of skewed distributions of words across different contexts. I argue that the human capacity for associative learning, combined with attention to fine-phonetic detail at the (...) level of the word, plays a significant role in predicting a range of subtle but systematically robust observed socioindexical patterns in speech production and perception. (shrink)