A unit of
language that
encodes a
meaning, but does not necessarily stand on its own as a
word or part of a
sentence. Words themselves are morphemes, but words (in English, for example) can be composed of multiple morphemes. In the
English word 'disturbingly', the morphemes are 'disturb', '-ing', and '-ly', each of which modifes the meaning of the resulting word.
Some languages, such as those spoken by the
Inuits, have such
productive morphemes that there is a huge number of "words" to be made (see
Eskimos do NOT have 40 words for snow).
Isolating languages, like
Chinese, do very little combination of morphemes to form separate words. Even more interesting is the
root-and-pattern morphology of
Semitic languages like
Hebrew.