"Words and Intelligence I" is an academic book that honors the significant contributions of Yorick Wilks in the fields of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. Wilks is a central figure in these disciplines and has played a key role in the development of technologies such as machine translation, word sense interpretation, dialogue modeling, and information retrieval. This book presents a selection of his works that reflect the diversity and depth of his output. It accompanies a festschrift celebrating his achievements in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. The included papers encompass both early works at the University of Cambridge and groundbreaking studies on machine translation and preference semantics, as well as more recent research on belief models and computer-assisted semantics. The selection of works highlights both the practical and theoretical aspects of automatic language processing that Wilks has significantly influenced.