morpheme

From French morphème. Ultimately from Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ, “shape, form”). By surface analysis, morph +‎ -eme.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈmɔː.fiːm/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (General American, Canada) IPA^(key): /ˈmɔɹ.fim/
• (General Australian, New Zealand) IPA^(key): /ˈmoː.fiːm/

morpheme (plural morphemes)

1. (linguistic morphology) The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:morpheme

   Coordinate terms: chereme, chroneme, grapheme, lexeme, listeme, phoneme, sememe, taxeme, toneme

   • 1970, Thomas Pyles, John Algeo, English: An Introduction to Language, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, page 135:

     Just as a regiment is ultimately made up of soldiers, so the sentence is of morphemes—they are its ultimate constituents.

   • 1993, Peter Matthews, “Central Concepts of Syntax”, in Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Theo Vennemann, editors, Syntax, Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 95:

     There is therefore a natural tendency in both American and European structural linguistics to insist that the word should be syntactically decomposed. For writers such as Hockett (1958), or for that matter the early Chomsky (1957), the indivisible unit of grammar was the morpheme, and the relationship of morpheme to morpheme within the word […] was to be handled no differently from that of word to word in any larger structure.

• word

• allomorph
• lemma
• word form
• Appendix:Morphology

• “morpheme”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• “morpheme”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
• morpheme in Britannica Dictionary