morpheme

CEFRC2

/ˈmɔː.fiːm/

noun

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

01
noun
The smallest part of a word that has meaning.
02
noun
Extra detail
The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.

Examples

At a glance

Sits at C2 on the CEFR scale

Also pronounced

Deep Dive

In context

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

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Question 1 · Quick check

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

The word in print, with each source given in full.

Just as a regiment is ultimately made up of soldiers, so the sentence is of morphemes—they are its ultimate constituents.
1970, Thomas Pyles, John Algeo, English: An Introduction to Language, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, page 135
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.
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

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