From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishphonemepho‧neme /ˈfəʊniːm $ ˈfoʊ-/ noun [countable] technical SLthe smallest unit of speech that can be used to make one word different from another word, such as the ‘b’ and the ‘p’ in ‘big’ and ‘pig’ → morpheme —phonemic /fəˈniːmɪk/ adjective —phonemically /-kli/ adverb
Examples from the Corpus
phoneme• The question might be answered by saying that the new phonemes are to be classed as vowels.• At the lexical level the frame of discernment consists of words expressed as ordered sets of phonemes.• For example, the validity of a string of phonemes depends on what is in the lexical data base.• The particular phoneme used generally depends on the surrounding sounds or the position of the sound in a word.• More marginal are those in which there is correspondence only in some of the segmental phonemes.• One cause is the effort that children in all societies must make to master the phonemes of their language.• It should be noted, however, that the problems discussed above with reference to phoneme recognition apply to other units such as syllables as well.Origin phoneme (1800-1900) French phonème, from Greek phonema “speech sound” 