morpheme
/ˈmɔː.fiːm/US/ˈmɔɹ.fim/
morpheme noun: the smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.
Noun
morpheme (plural morphemes)
- The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.
- 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...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
morpheme meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Tagalog and Arabic
morpheme in Hindi
- smallest linguistic unit
- रूपिम rūpim
morpheme in Tamil
- உருபன்
morpheme in Tagalog
- smallest linguistic unit
- multuran, morpema
morpheme in Arabic
- smallest linguistic unit
- مُورْفِيم mōrfēm, مَقْطَع صَرْفِيّ maqṭaʕ ṣarfiyy
More languagesFewer languages
- morpheme in Malay
- morfem
- morpheme in Indonesian
- morfem
- morpheme in Persian
- تکواژ takvâž
- morpheme in Thai
- หน่วยคำ nùai-kam
- morpheme in Vietnamese
- hình vị
Examples of morpheme in a sentence
- Book is a free morpheme, but the -s on books is not, because -s carries no meaning until joined to a free morpheme.
- The morpheme in question is the reflexive prefix ('infix' in the traditional Bantu terminology).
- Consider, then, the result of applying these tense morphemes to a perfective or an imperfective verb.
Forms of morpheme
| plural | morphemes |
|---|
Origin of morpheme
From French morphème. Ultimately from Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ, “shape, form”). By surface analysis, morph + -eme.
Words formed from morpheme
Questions about morpheme
- What does morpheme mean?
- Morpheme means the smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning. It may be a letter, a syllable, or otherwise.
- What is morpheme in Hindi?
- Morpheme in Hindi is रूपिम (rūpim). See Morpheme meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is morpheme?
- Morpheme is a noun.
- How do you pronounce morpheme?
- Morpheme is pronounced /ˈmɔː.fiːm/ (UK).
- What is the plural of morpheme?
- The plural of morpheme is morphemes.
Words near morpheme in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: morpheme (page history and authors); morpheme (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-morpheme.wav.
Cite this entry: “morpheme.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/morpheme. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.