Word.ws English Dictionary

phonemes

phonemes is the plural of phoneme.

Meaning of phoneme

Noun

phoneme (plural phonemes)

  1. An indivisible unit of sound in a given language. A phoneme is an abstraction of the physical speech sounds (phones) and may encompass several different phones.
    • It is crucial for the phoneme structure of Finnish — traditionally /d/ has not been included in the Finnish phonotax, but it fulfils the criteria of a phoneme (Karlsson, 1983: 66-7).1990, Jarmo Lainio, “Sweden Finnish — development or deterioration?”, in Durk Gorter, editor, Fourth International Conference on Minority Languages: Western and Eastern European papers, Multilingual...

Questions about phonemes

What is phonemes the plural of?
Phonemes is the plural of phoneme.

Words near phonemes in the dictionary

  1. phonematic
  2. phonematically
  3. phonematics
  4. phoneme
  5. phonemehood
  6. phonemes
  7. phonemic
  8. phonemic merger
  9. phonemic mergers
  10. phonemic split
  11. phonemic splits

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phonemes (page history and authors); phoneme (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-phonemes.wav.

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