Words & WritingGreek → English
Morpheme
/ˈmɔːrfiːm/noun
The smallest piece of a word that carries meaning.
The Greek roots
μορφή
morphḗ
form, shape
Literally: “a unit of form”
Follow a root:μορφή20 words
The story of the word
Baudouin de Courtenay coined the term in the 1880s, modelling it directly on phoneme, for the smallest unit that carries meaning rather than sound. Μορφή was shape, the word Ovid's Metamorphoses turns on and the root of morphology and amorphous. Cats has two morphemes, the animal and the plural, and unhappiness has three.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
morphologyamorphousmetamorphosisphoneme
In a sentence
Turkish can stack half a dozen morphemes onto one noun.