mor·pheme

(môr′fēm′)

A meaningful linguistic unit that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. The word man and the suffix -ed (as in walked) are morphemes.

[French morphème, blend of Greek morphē, form and French phonème, phoneme; see phoneme.]

mor·phem′ic adj.

mor·phem′i·cal·ly adv.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

morpheme

(ˈmɔːfiːm)

(Linguistics) linguistics a speech element having a meaning or grammatical function that cannot be subdivided into further such elements

[C20: from French, from Greek morphē form, coined on the model of phoneme; see -eme]

morˈphemic adj

morˈphemically adv

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

mor•pheme

(ˈmɔr fim)

n.

any of the minimal grammatical units of a language, each constituting a word or meaningful part of a word that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts, as the, write, or the -ed of waited. Compare allomorph (def. 2).

[1895–1900; < French morphème; see morph-, -eme]

mor•phe′mic, adj.

mor•phe′mi•cal•ly, adv.

morpheme

A word or part of a word that cannot be further divided into smaller elements.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

morpheme - minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units

language unit, linguistic unit - one of the natural units into which linguistic messages can be analyzed

allomorph - a variant phonological representation of a morpheme; "the final sounds of `bets' and `beds' and `horses' and `oxen' are allomorphs of the English plural morpheme"

free form, free morpheme - a morpheme that can occur alone

bound form, bound morpheme - a morpheme that occurs only as part of a larger construction; eg an -s at the end of plural nouns

classifier - a word or morpheme used in some languages in certain contexts (such as counting) to indicate the semantic class to which the counted item belongs

ending, termination - the end of a word (a suffix or inflectional ending or final morpheme); "I don't like words that have -ism as an ending"

Translations

морфема

morfém

morfeemi

morfem

morféma

morfemaморфема

morfem

морфема

morpheme

[ˈmɔːfiːm] N → morfema m

Collins Spanish Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged 8th Edition 2005 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1971, 1988 © HarperCollins Publishers 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005

morpheme

n → Morphem nt

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

morpheme

[ˈmɔːfiːm] n → morfema m

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

Dieter Kastovsky's Old English Deverbal Substantives Derived by Means of a Zero Morpheme (1968) presents a complete framework of recurrent and fairly frequent constrasts or alternations between the vocalism of verbs and deverbal nouns.

Nuevas perspectivas en la derivacion cero y las alternancias del ingles antiguo

We also wrote word 'sums', identified prefixes and suffixes, developed a morpheme wall and investigated graphemes and phonemes.

An afternoon teaching phonology to Prep M

The fact that the per-token means are lower than the corresponding per-type means shows that the majority of responses contained only one added morpheme.

Word-formation preferences of non-natives

If someone is writhing in pain I think morpheme should be used, and lethal doses, if necessary.

Maybe it's time to discuss end-of-life options

She is currently holding the post of Art Director at Morpheme Studios and lives in Karachi, Pakistan.

'An Ode to Heaven' opens at Satrang Art Gallery

So, given morpheme is a small unit of language and that "hypocorism" is changing the shape of words, like moulding plastic, I say we call these words Scouse "plazzy-morphs".

A world of 'plazzymorphs'

For instance the word yesil (green) was not included in the original root list, because TLA considers this word as derived as yas (fresh) + il (derivational morpheme).

Rule-Based Turkish Text Summarizer (RB-TTS)

The authors prefer to see this as a suffix =itu, before which the transitive =u= morpheme elides, although they do allow for other possibilities.

Einfuhrung in die urartaische Sprache

In addition, morpheme-based lexicons used in voice recognition have problems of errors propagated through a morpheme analysis and a space segmentation.

Maximum Likelihood-based Automatic Lexicon Generation for AI Assistant-based Interaction with Mobile Devices

One representation considers "the semantic relationship between the meaning of a morpheme within a compound and the independent meaning of that same morpheme" (Libben 1998: 37).

Limits on the extension of affixal combination: structural restrictions and processing conditions/Ogranicenja pri prosirivanju afiksalnih kombinacija: strukturna ogranicenja i uvjeti procesiranja

That this comes under zero morpheme may explain why Bender (2000) states that many scholars view affixation as the only process, adding that they see other morphological processes as forms of affixation.

Morphological processes in Anaku Igbo: situating universality