[@VitaVitaAR]
Yeah, I'm working on trying to power it down a bit, because I think the whole point of it in the original fic is that it [i]is[/i] pretty damn OP. I'm thinking of working it so that they take [i]a lot[/i] of mana, or otherwise have some different form of negative effect to their use so he can't just spam word blades constantly. Also, just one of a certain word leads to a fairly weak modification in the long run, so more often than not, he is required to repeat words a few times to have the proper effect. Then he'll be forced to rely on pre-enchanted objects, made by attaching the concept words to objects ahead of time with a very similar form of magic.

Along with those, I'm also planning to make it so he has to actually study the words in order to use them in spells and enchantments as they're in some kind of crazy magic language, something which has been very slow going while he has been in hiding, with very little in the way of information sources.

As for it being a Magic Trait, maybe... I was hoping for him to actually not have one honestly, so that way I could have him be just that little bit further separated from the image of an ideal mage family head.

Edit:
Oh, there's also the fact that it [i]has[/i] to be an actual thing he's creating with the words, or connecting them too. He can't just say 'speed' and then move super fast, or 'strong' and then be super strong, he'd have to create some kind of phantasmal hand that would be super strong, but that would also take a frankly painful number of words to form properly. 
It's almost a little bit like coding, except I'm way less terrible at understanding it.