When selecting text by word, sequences of these characters are considered single words. Ranges can be given as "A-Z". Literal hyphen (not expressing a range) should be the first character given.
Normally you can access the menubar with F10. This can also be customized via gtkrc (gtk-menu-bar-accel = "whatever"). This option allows the standard menubar accelerator to be disabled.
Whether to have Alt+letter access keys for the menubar. They may interfere with some applications run inside the terminal so it's possible to turn them off.