morpheme

See also: Morpheme and morphème

English

WOTD – 17 May 2012, 17 May 2013, 17 May 2014, 17 May 2015

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

Noun

Examples
  • The word pigs consists of two morphemes: pig (a particular animal) and s (indication of the plural).
  • The word werewolves consists of three morphemes: were (~ man), wolf (a particular animal), es (plural).
  • The word 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

Hyponyms

Holonyms

Derived terms

Translations

See also

Further reading

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.