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morpheme - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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

Examples
  • pigs consists of two morphemes: pig (a particular animal) and s (indication of the plural).
  • werewolves consists of three morphemes: were (“man”), wolf (a particular animal), es (plural).
  • feet consists of two morphemes: foot (a body part) and i-mutation (plural).

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.

smallest linguistic unit