From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishmorphememor‧pheme /ˈmɔːfiːm $ ˈmɔːr-/ noun [countable] technicalSL the smallest unit of meaning in a language. The words ‘so’, ‘the’, and ‘boy’ consist of one morpheme. ‘Boys’ consists of two morphemes, ‘boy’ and ‘s’ the past tense morpheme the plural morpheme
Examples from the Corpus
morpheme• For others, syllable and character represent at most not a word but rather a morpheme, the smallest unit of meaning.• However, similar effects are also observable across morpheme boundaries and to some extent also within the morpheme.• Determining the constituent morphemes is further complicated because there may be more than one possible segmentation for a word.• For example, un-friend-li-ness contains four morphemes, and war only one.• These two kinds of deictic usage contrast with the non-deictic usage of the same words or morphemes.• Spelling changes may occur at the morpheme boundaries resulting in slight changes to the surface string produced by the morpheme combinations.Origin morpheme (1800-1900) French morphème, from Greek morphe “form” + English -eme (as in phoneme) 