Meaning & use
morpheme
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Meaning
nouncountabletechnical
The smallest piece of a word that carries meaning or grammatical function, such as un-, happy, or -ness.
Grammar: Countable: the word unhappiness has three morphemes.
Patterns
- a morpheme of something
- a morpheme in a word
The word cats has two morphemes: cat and the plural -s.
A morpheme cannot be split into smaller meaningful parts.
The prefix re- is a morpheme meaning again.
Word forms
| plural | morphemes |
|---|
Common combinations
- free morpheme
- The word book is a free morpheme because it can stand alone.
- bound morpheme
- The ending -ed is a bound morpheme and cannot stand alone.
- grammatical morpheme
- The plural -s is a grammatical morpheme.
- divide into morphemes
- Students learn to divide long words into morphemes.
- root morpheme
- In unkindly, kind is the root morpheme.
Synonyms and how they differ
- word part
- Word part is a plain classroom term, whereas morpheme is the precise linguistic name for a unit of meaning.
- affix
- Affix means a prefix or suffix added to a root, so it covers only some morphemes, not roots themselves.
- root
- Root is the core morpheme carrying the main meaning, which makes it narrower than morpheme.
Word family
- morphology noun
- the study of word forms and their parts
- morphological adjective
- relating to the structure of words
- morphemic adjective
- relating to morphemes
- allomorph noun
- a variant form of a morpheme, such as the different pronunciations of plural -s
Commonly confused: morpheme or syllable? morpheme or phoneme?
morpheme vs syllable
A syllable is a unit of sound, such as the two beats in table. A morpheme is a unit of meaning, so the word cats has one syllable but two morphemes.
morpheme vs phoneme
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes words, and does not carry meaning by itself. A morpheme does.
Practice
How many morphemes are in the word replayed?
Choose one answer.
Replayed splits into re-, play, and -ed, which are three meaningful parts. Counting syllables would give the wrong number.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “morpheme”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.