Morpheme

morpheme, in linguistics, the smallest grammatical unit of speech; it may be a word, like “place” or “an,” or an element of a word, like re- and -ed in “reappeared.” So-called isolating languages, such as Vietnamese, have a one-to-one correspondence of morphemes to words; i.e., no words contain more than one morpheme. Variants of a morpheme are called allomorphs; the ending -s, indicating plural in “cats,” “dogs,” the -es in “dishes,” and the -en of “oxen” are all allomorphs of the plural morpheme. The word “talked” is represented by two morphemes, “talk” and the past-tense morpheme, here indicated by -ed. The study of words and morphemes is included in morphology (q.v.).