Saussure also focuses on the arbitrary nature of signs.This means that a word and the sounds that make up a word don’t tell us anything about word means. For example, the word “dog” doesn’t tell us about what a dog is. The letters and sounds chosen are not special.  Most words are chosen in this way. A small amount of words are not. For example in the word “slap”, the letters sound like the noise you hear when you slap something. The arbitrary nature of sounds allows us to make many words. If every letter had a single meaning, then we could only create a small number of words with that letter.