Recording Single Word Multiple Times

I need to produce 20 recordings of the same spoken word. Each needs to have <=500ms leading and trailing silence. I am new to Audacity.
What are your suggestions for the easiest way to do this (step-by-step if you can)? Thank you for your help!

I guess there’s some important detail missing from your post, otherwise:
Use an iPhone, dictaphone, or anything else that can record at the press of a button, press the record button, and say the word 20 times, leaving about half a second between each word.

If you need 20 separate audio files, label the individual sections, and use export multiple to create the individual files.
[ If you need true flat-line silence, a noise-gate will squelch any noise below a user-defined threshold to silence ]

say the word 20 times,

These recordings will be used for a dataset to train a machine learning application and the same word needs to be spoken and recorded 20 separate times.
I am wondering what the most efficient way to do this will be. Each recording needs to be a separate file. Thanks.

Assuming that you have Audacity set up to record from a microphone (if not, see here in the manual: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_your_first_recording.html)

  1. Press the Record button
  2. Record yourself saying the word 20 times, then stop the recording
  3. Label each word with a region label (http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/label_tracks.html)
    The “Sound Finder” could be used here, but for only 20 labels it would not take much longer to manually add the labels.
  4. “Export multiple” to make an audio file from each labelled region http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/export_multiple.html