Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b of bat in English.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Same as phone, n.
- n. A voice-sound imagined by the insane; a hallucination of voices.
Wiktionary
- n. linguistics 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.
WordNet 3.0
- n. (linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language
Etymologies
- From Ancient Greek φώνημα (phōnēma, "sound"), from φωνέω (phōneō, "to sound"), from φωνή (phōnē, "sound"). (Wiktionary)
- French phonème, from Greek phōnēma, phōnēmat-, utterance, sound produced, from phōnein, to produce a sound, from phōnē, sound, voice; see bhā-2 in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“By the 2nd millennium BC, Mesopotamian script changed from pictographic to cuneiform writing (wedge shaped signs representing sounds instead of objects), and by around 2000BC the first true alphabetic system (where a phoneme is represented by a letter) appeared.”
The History Of Reading « Literacy Articles « Articles « Literacy News
“In addition, the English-Greek children also outperformed their Greek/English counterparts in phoneme awareness tasks, suggesting that learning an alphabetic language as a first one (English) promotes the level of phonological awareness (phonemic awareness).”
“A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a given language that can be recognized as being distinct from other sounds in the language.”
Homeschool Reading Programs Help Homeschooling Parents Teach Effectively « Articles « Literacy News
“A phoneme is a set of similar sounds showing meaning differences or differentiating between words.”
Teaching Efl Pronunciation: Why, What and How? « Articles « Literacy News
“I would like to think this meant the pasta was served by bongo-playing beatnik waiters, but I'm afraid the explanation is much more prosaic: most low-level jobs in New York restaurants are filled by Spanish-speakers, and in Spanish b and v are purely graphic variants for the same phoneme, which is pronounced b at the start of a word.”
“He read our names from a slate, stumbling over the "W" phoneme, which is strange to the Norlan dialect.”
“The other promising audio searching technology is known as phoneme software.”
“But the good news is that the easiest and most effective way to promote basic literacy skills in young children – - skills that have fancy names such as phoneme awareness and alliteration sensitivity – - is simply to read aloud to kids.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘phoneme’.
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G[r]eek
A collection of words found in English that are either purely Greek or have Greek etymology.
Please add with caution and certainty. Will be regularly updated by me.etymology, philosophy, laconic, disharmony, patriarchic, archaic, phlogiston, aether, aeon, angel, arachnid, rhythm and 346 more...
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*e?e
Words whose last and third-to-last letters are both "e".
here, eke, were, complete, mete, replete, adhere, where, mere, sphere, austere, aesthete and 99 more...
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wallace
Remington, Windsor, prorector, wen, aver, mottle, seltzer, tepee, lapidary, effete, sotto, presbyopia and 355 more...
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phono-, phon-, -phony
relating to sound
phonograph, phonics, phonology, telephony, phoneme, phone, telephone, phonautograph, phonetic, phonebook, phonography, phonolite and 107 more...
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GRE Study guide
Going through the Magoosh website, words I pulled from the verbal section. 2012.
magnanimous, correlate, anglicized, simulacrum, tantamount, obsequiousness, subterfuge, vehement, vociferous, benign, concomitant, veracity and 83 more...
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Phones
Compare with "phono-, phon-, -phony"
(a list specifically "relating to sound") by hap_e_wordnik.
I'm just phoning it in these days (obviously).phone, telephone, tisiphone, homophone, allophone, xylophone, metallophone, polyphone, persephone, phoneme, anglophone, phoney and 7 more...
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Terms of Phonetics
Phonetic concepts that are fascinating or novel.
An open-ended list, so this can also include abstract or linguistic terms.tessaraphthong, samprasarana, great vowel shift, phonotactics, t-glottalization, hushing, bilabial, lexicostatistics, hachek, surd, ɲɟǃǃʎ, isogloss and 32 more...
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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...
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theory and history of art: terms and ...
phenomenological, nonphenomenological, kineticism, mechanizing, digitalizing, utations, trajectory, synthesized, spatio-temporal, proliferation, quantification, iterative and 118 more...
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JesusIsLord's Words
debauchery, plethora, wiki, numinous, wormwood, scribe, gelded, mithridate, orthogonal, jaculiferous, jaculate, jactitation and 415 more...
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words found to be generally pleasing
alabaster, mahogany, camphor, coalesce, spire, portmanteau, gadabout, palaver, dolor, dour, dun, luminesce and 610 more...
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Infinite Jest
Words taken from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
prorector, monograph, post-fourier, snuffle, rototremble, creatus, enfilade, subanimalistic, balletic, espadrilles, leonine, cirri and 1153 more...
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dark and bright words of shine and fi...
scotophil, scotoma, scotia, shed, shadow, shade, scone, whiting, edelweiss, light, lightning, lucina and 349 more...
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colleen's words ii
sibilant, sundry, spindle, distaff, device, mortar, pestle, scythe, flail, thresh, frown, elementary and 495 more...
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Necessary?
"Words are very..."
The above was the original description for this list. Unfortunately, it doesn't convey much about the list contents.
I'm leaving you to draw your own conclusions abo...supererogation, fruitcake, unbeknownst, melifluous, bane, cavy, unnecessary, lyrical, question, undertow, weapon, arduous and 200 more...
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Aequoria's list
affect, deleterious, nuance, pliant, verbatim, pertinent, latter, municipality, provincial, voyeuristic, circumlocution, wane and 798 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for phoneme.
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