Word usually freezes on mine to.
If you can get to the toolbar (spcificly the apple logo), chick "force quit" or press "command-option-escape" at the same time.
If you can't interact with Word but the rest of the system is happy, you can "force quit" as recommended above and Word usually does incremental auto saves of documents and should prompt you to recover when you restart.
However, I'm not sure if Word auto-saves unnamed or never saved documents. In which case you will have to restart the entire process over again..
The auto-save feature of Word (Word 2011) is almost useless when Word freezes or the machine freezes. The MS Word forums are filled with horror stories about this. About the only effective way to protect your documents in Word is to select "Always Make a Backup" in preferences. That way, at least you'll have your document minus any edits you made when the freeze occurred.
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