MORPHEME

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. Every word comprises one or more morphemes.

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morpheme

Noun

  1. The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry a meaning, such as "un-", "break", and "-able" in the word "unbreakable".
    The word pigs consists of two morphemes: pig (a particular animal) and s (indication of the plural).''
    The word werewolves' consists of four morphemes: "were" (~ man), "wolf" (a particular animal), "es" (plural), and " ' " (indicating possessive).


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: morpheme
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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