Definition of "morpheme" [mor•pheme]

• A meaningful linguistic unit consisting of a word, such as man, or a word element, such as -ed in walked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "I think that the possessive morpheme is technically a clitic."
• "A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in the language."
• "Logograms are like Chinese characters: each represents a word or morpheme a morpheme is the smallest part of the word that has a meaning of its own."