The phrase 'separate words' is correct and can be used in written English.
You can use it when referring to individual words that are distinct from those around them. For example, "Notice how the author has separated the words 'apple' and 'orange' with a comma."
Earlier, Koreans wrote syllables as distinct blocks but failed to separate words.
Watch it here The ancient Greeks had four separate words for the emotion.
As famously said by Geoffrey Howe, by drawing on the ability to separate words from meaning.
A poem written about her posthumously used "psycho" and "therapist" as two separate words on the page.
[Headline] D.N.A. Backs Lore on Pre-Columbian Dogs DNA, for deoxyribonucleic acid, does not stand for three separate words and so does not take periods under our style.
Other languages, such as Malay, make a lexical distinction of age the primary one, with separate words for elder brother or sister and younger brother or sister.
He has a separate word for everything".
Furthermore, he regarded sentence meaning as composed of separate word meanings held together in a relational structure; the word meaning formed, for him, the simplest unit of sense.
There will have to be separate wording, of course, for clergy couples, to lay down the which-bits-are-out-of-bounds rule, but otherwise, bring it on.
It is difficult to think of lyric poetry — which presents X-rays of the self in moments of being — without any separate word for "self".
In Chinese grass style, although the words are greatly simplified and several words can be joined together with trailing strokes, each separate word normally still retains its regular spacing within an imaginary square, big or small.
