Words are the "simplistic" projection of an LLM's abstract thoughts.

An LLM has: words in its input plane, words in its output plane, and A LOT of cross-linked internals between the two.

Those internals aren't "words" at all - and it's where most of the "action" happens. It's how LLMs can do things like translate from language to language, or recall knowledge they only encountered in English in the training data while speaking German.