1. the smallest meaningful unit of language that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts
Usage: linguistics

Examples

• The word ‘cats’ contains two morphemes: ‘cat’ and the plural suffix ‘-s’.
• In linguistics class, we learned that ‘unhappy’ has three morphemes: ‘un-‘, ‘happy’, and ‘-y’.
• The morpheme ‘pre-‘ means ‘before’ in words like ‘preview’ and ‘prehistoric’.
• Free morphemes like ‘book’ can stand alone, while bound morphemes like ‘-ed’ must attach to other words.
• Students analyzed how many morphemes were in compound words like ‘playground’.
• The root morpheme ‘walk’ appears in ‘walking’, ‘walked’, and ‘walker’.