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Typical philosophy, looking for some sort of mystical complexity in something that's obvious... but by all means, keep fumbling around until science advances to such a point at which this has practible value, and explaining this is relegated to an introductory paragraph in any given paper on the topic...

Only joking. Sort of. :/

Few words have precise definitions. The fact that we may struggle to find precicse definitions for certain terms is a consequence of the fact that we never learnt precise definitions in the first place. We simply "learn by example", building a heuristic for what we may, for example, call a chair. When presented with a new object, we evaluate it again our heuristic and decide the closest fit. It so happens that certain things are so often found on chairs (e.g. four legs) that this is the most prominent mental image. Nevertheless, "a chair" would be defined in any number of ways, even depending on context. For example, any vaguely chair shaped object may become 'a chair' once you observe that it is being used as a place to sit. (Or maybe you would evaluate it as 'a seat' if something being used to sit on was not sufficiently chair shaped).

With this in mind, I must say I do agree with the original idea that words are all ultimately defined in terms of sensations. After all, even if you define a new word in terms of existing words, those words themselves are defined in terms of sensations etc

By trying to assign things particular definitions, you are approximating the language, not allowing for the inherent 'fuzzyness' in definitions, thus there will always be exceptions to any 'rules' you come up with. As an analogy, I would probably liken this to floating point approximating the real numbers. You can refine the system as much as you like, but you will never catch it in its entirety.