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Morphemes are the indivisible basic units of language, much like the atoms which physicists once assumed were the indivisible units of matter. English speakers borrowed morpheme from French morphème, which was itself created from the Greek root morphē, meaning "form." The French borrowed -ème from their word phonème, which, like English phoneme, means "the smallest unit of speech that can be used to make one word different from another word." The French suffix and its English equivalent -eme are used to create words that refer to distinctive units of language structure. Words formed from -eme include lexeme ("a meaningful linguistic unit that is an item in the vocabulary of a language"), grapheme ("a unit of a writing system"), and toneme ("a unit of intonation in a language in which variations in tone distinguish meaning").
Examples of morpheme in a Sentence
Anvita Abbi, Scientific American, 16 May 2023
Those words are made up of morphemes, small elements that change their meaning depending on how they are combined.
—Ian Austen, BostonGlobe.com, 22 Apr. 2023
In a multistage process of evolution, words describing diverse body parts had changed into morphemes referring to different zones and fused with content words to yield meaning.
—Anvita Abbi, Scientific American, 16 May 2023
The slips of paper contained the morphemes, which are the building blocks for the entire language.
—Ian Austen, BostonGlobe.com, 22 Apr. 2023
Each of the, say, two hundred and fifty passengers on each flight hanging unwittingly on each morpheme.
—Gregory Pardlo, The New Yorker, 12 Feb. 2017
Cite this Entry
“Morpheme.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morpheme. Accessed 2 May. 2025.
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morpheme
noun
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