Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as -ed in walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts.
Wiktionary
- n. linguistics The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning, such as "un-", "break", and "-able" in the word "unbreakable".
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Linguistics) The smallest unit of meaning of a language, which cannot be divided into smaller parts carrying meaning; it is usually smaller than a single wordform, such as the -ed morpheme of verbs in the past tense or the -s morpheme of nouns in the plural form.
WordNet 3.0
- n. minimal meaningful language unit; it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units
Etymologies
- From French morphème. (Wiktionary)
- French morphème, blend of Greek morphē, form and French phonème, phoneme; see phoneme. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I think that the possessive morpheme is technically a clitic.”
Preposterous Apostrophes III: The kings of England’s « Motivated Grammar
“A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in the language.”
Homeschool Reading Programs Help Homeschooling Parents Teach Effectively « Articles « Literacy News
“Logograms are like Chinese characters: each represents a word or morpheme a morpheme is the smallest part of the word that has a meaning of its own.”
“A Basic Model of Grammar Most theories of grammar accept that grammatical units are ordered hierarchically according to their size (a rank scale) o sentence (or clause complex) clause …. phrase (or group) … word … morpheme The morpheme is the smallest unit in grammar simply because it has no structure of its own.”
“A unit which is different PHONOLOGICALLY and SEMANTICALLY is not considered to be a morpheme as a morpheme is a distinct meaningful unit in its own.”
“It makes direct use of the notion of morpheme in the definition of agglutinative and fusional languages.”
“A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language; a bound morpheme is one that appears only in combination with another morpheme, such as the suffixes and prefixes of English.”
“I'm using in its linguistics context where a "morpheme" is a unit of meaning, so: "poly" - many, "morphic" †"meanings.”
“He wept as he mouthed so many polysyllabic diamonds, each morpheme packed with mean men, dirty children and rust.”
“You probably feel at times like a chord of a conic section that passes through a focus and is parallel to the directrix, but know for certain that the phonemic differences between allormorphs of the same morpheme is supported by the idea that the quantitative measurement of many characters to the determination of taxa and to the construction of diagrams indicating systematic changes can make or break us.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘morpheme’.
-
EN - fine scholarly language
exhort, accretion, twenty-nine, atrophy, additive, brilliantly, interreligious, empiricism, pathologic, limitless, half-century, vigilant and 488 more...
-
SCIE - natural language processing
parsing, tagging, computational lin..., computer science, language processing, machine learning, natural language ..., semantic level, word sense ambiguity, discourse level, anaphora, ambiguity and 332 more...
-
goodkitten's list
there is going to be a lot of words...
flammivomous, pep, electrolyzation, research, constrain, why, refrigerator, invisible, windblown, curate's egg, echoism, drumble and 103 more...
-
INTERP - terminology management terms
Terms from the fields of terminology, lexicography, lexicology and corpus linguistics
reworder, rewording, parser, parsing, tagger, tagging, aligner, aligning, content analysis, content analyzer, corpus management, glossary and 546 more...
-
Words build meanings from origins( et...
These come from gamma meditation ,I think.
discursive, exogenous, machinations, purportedly, sumptuous, congruity, cantankerous, incongruous, festoon, hessian, ratiocinative, stratigraphic and 2046 more...
-
WF - Word Formation Words
Classes of words and types of word formation
sniglet, protologism, portmanteau word, blend, telescope-word, frankenword, double-entendre, compound, derivative, palindrome, spoonerism, malapropism and 152 more...
-
Words about Words
words to describe language
invective, eloquent, laconic, solecism, calque, cognate, bombastic, verbose, anthimeria, magniloquent, amphigory, morpheme and 6 more...
-
art & linguistics
macron, isochrony, irrealis, isogloss, majuscule, preverb, prevocalic, tonogenesis, volitive, experiencer, enclitic, lithophane and 24 more...
-
::: Words I llike the DEFINITIONS of :::
The dichotomy of a word .... and yes *dichotomy* would be on this very list.
inflection, syntax, morpheme, oneiric, phantasmagoria, poetess, convalescence, thoughtful, sober, searching, deep, meaningful and 1 more...
-
Words I Intend to use.
selectarian, solastalgia, niefling, eldritch, santagnostic, laborious, obstreperous, quibble, inusitate, cacology, tmesis, cacoethes and 50 more...
-
Medical terms or linguistic terms?
That's a terrible ablative case. Get me some morpheme, stet!
stet, stat, morpheme, morphine, ablative case, salmonella, morphology, nephrology, alethic modality, anaphoric clitic, bolus, hyperbole and 54 more...
-
Morphemes
morphemes greek and latin prefixes, suffixes and roots.
http://www.learnthat.org/vocabulary/pages/view/roots.htmlkinein, matic, thermo, a-, ob-, pro-, inflection, semantics, syntax, derivational suff..., inflectional suff..., morpheme and 87 more...
-
These words are about words.
words on words. yyep.
codex, folio, lexicon, tome, word stock, wordbook, wordlist, palaver, word index, argot, parlance, doublespeak and 68 more...
-
ChortleGiggleSnort
Significant Words- Guiding you on your path to Snazzibility
flimsy, feeble, ranting, ramble, narky, snazzy, yoghurt, bulbous, pustule, globulous, geranium, megalomaniac and 521 more...
-
quality words
This is a mix of new words I've read studying for the GRE verbal and words I use normally. I also check back on these words if I don't use them often enough.
ineffable, septuagenarian, sesquipedalian, argyle, coalescence, profundity, vivisepulture, defenestrate, concatenate, usurp, diatribe, veracious and 461 more...
-
Logodaedalus' Lexical Locutionary
Discombobulating the illiterate since the middle of the last century.
adiaphora, agitprop, alliteration, apophthegm, autarky, bête noire, bezoar, biorhythm, braggadocio, canaille, confabulate, confrère and 332 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for morpheme.
jmjarmstrong JM reckons morphemes rock! Mar 23, 2011
whichbe Not to be confused with morphine. Jun 25, 2007