According to the Samkhya school of thought, a word signifies

For the Samkhya view, a word signifies the individual (vyakti).

The word directly points to the particular object standing before us.

It is the concrete individual thing, not a bare form or a universal, that the word denotes.

This differs from views taking a word to mean the shape (akriti) or the class-essence (jati).

Samkhya thus locates the meaning of a word in the individual object.