Whatever my understanding of words and their significance is, it is closer to Locke's understanding, as I think it is more accurate to say that words we use stand for the ideas we have of those things, rather than the actual things themselves. Locke brings up the fact that it would be impossible to have words for every individual thing in the world, much the same way it would be useless to have ideas of every individual thing in the world, and he then discusses how it is because of this that words do not reflect the reality of things. I am also under the impression that it is impossible to grasp the full reality of things in the world merely with our limited conception of ideas and hence words, and Locke seems to be nearing my own conception.
Locke brings up in the end that the 'abstract idea for which a name stands' is equal to 'the essence of the species,' and I would ask him, if our words reflect our ideas, but our ideas and hence our words do not reflect reality, how can they signify the essence of a thing? I imagine the essence of a thing to be equal to or at least close to the reality of that thing.
Mill argues that the words and names of things we use are the things themselves, and I would quite simply ask him how can he be sure that everyone's understanding of a name of some thing can in fact be the same, while keeping in mind that the names of things were created by humans. He seems to be under the impression that the names of things stand alone, independent of our understanding of them, but this is hard to buy when the names themselves were human creations originally.
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