If your conversation partner understood what you meant, does it matter if it's not technically a word?

That's how words are born!

Someone explains it using a new utterance and the receiver understands it.

So now that sender is more likely to use it again (it worked before!) and the receiver might decide to use it too (viral transmission if they found it useful and clear enough).

And then that can run away and once a critical mass of the population understands it, boom, it's a word!