ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Morpheme

Definition, Meaning & Examples

Pronunciation /ˈmɔː.fiːm/ · Part of speech noun

Quick meaning: Morpheme is a noun meaning (linguistic morphology) The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.

Meaning

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

Example Sentences

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

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include lexeme, word, sememe, submorpheme, morphophoneme, lingueme.

Related Dictionary Tools

Sources & Attribution

FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary data is provided by FreeDictionaryAPI.com and sourced from Wiktionary under its stated license.