any one of the set of smallest units of speech in a language that distinguish one word from another. In English, the /s/ in sip and the /z/ in zip represent two different phonemes.See related entries:PhoneticsWord Originlate 19th cent.: from French phonème, from Greek phōnēma ‘sound, speech’, from phōnein ‘speak’.
See phoneme in the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary
