Word.ws English Dictionary

museme

museme noun: a minimal unit of musical meaning, analogous to a morpheme in linguistics.

Noun

museme (plural musemes)

  1. A minimal unit of musical meaning, analogous to a morpheme in linguistics.
    • Having established extramusical 'meaning' at the micro level, one should proceed to the explanation of the ways musemes are combined, simultaneously and successively.2000, Richard Middleton, Reading Pop : Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music

Forms of museme

pluralmusemes

Origin of museme

Brought to popularity by Philip Tagg, derived from the work of Charles Seeger.

Questions about museme

What does museme mean?
Museme means a minimal unit of musical meaning, analogous to a morpheme in linguistics.
What part of speech is museme?
Museme is a noun.
What is the plural of museme?
The plural of museme is musemes.

Words near museme in the dictionary

  1. muselars
  2. museless
  3. muselessness
  4. muselike
  5. musematic
  6. museme
  7. musemes
  8. Musenden
  9. museographer
  10. museographers
  11. museographic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: museme (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.

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Cite this entry: “museme.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/museme. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.