morpheme
smallest unit of meaning / linguistic unit
Noun
pl: morphemes
This term describes the atomic building block of linguistic meaning. It distinguishes between a free morpheme, which can stand alone as a word, and a bound morpheme, which must attach to another element to function, such as a prefix or suffix. In linguistic analysis, a morpheme is not necessarily a single syllable or a specific sequence of letters, but rather the smallest unit that contributes to the final meaning of a word. For example, the word "replayed" contains three morphemes: the prefix "re-", the root "play", and the suffix "-ed".