In the context of processing Bengali words through a computer, there may arise several issues that are directly linked with surface structure of words. These issues may create problems in manual and computer-based counting of number of words in a corpus. They can also create problems in morphological processing of words. These issues come up because there is hardly any consistency in orthographic representation of words in written Bengali texts. The high irregularities in writing of inflected words, proper names, adjectival forms, adverbial forms, compound words, reduplicated words, onomatopoeic words, hyphenated words, etc. present a daunting task before an investigator in normalizing the surface forms of words for generating a lexical database as well as developing a word processing system for the works of language technology.