morpheme
Other forms: morphemes
In linguistics, the smallest unit of language or grammar is called a morpheme. You can break words down into morphemes — like the -s at the end of a noun that tells you it's plural or the -ly at the end of a word that shows it's an adverb.
While some words can be divided into two or more morphemes, others consist of a single morpheme. The word dog, for example, is considered a "free" morpheme, because it can stand alone. Prefixes and suffixes like un- and -ing, are "bound" morphemes, dependent for meaning on other morphemes. A linguist coined the word in 1895, modeling it after phoneme, "distinct unit of sound," and adding the Greek morphe, "form or shape."
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minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful unitstypes:allomorpha variant phonological representation of a morphemebound form, bound morphemea morpheme that occurs only as part of a larger construction; eg an -s at the end of plural nounsclassifiera word or morpheme used in some languages in certain contexts (such as counting) to indicate the semantic class to which the counted item belongscombining forma bound form used only in compoundsaffixa linguistic element added to a word to produce an inflected or derived formmorphophoneme(linguistics) the phonemes (or strings of phonemes) that constitute the various allomorphs of a morphemetype of:language unit, linguistic unitone of the natural units into which linguistic messages can be analyzed
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Vocabulary lists containing morpheme
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