PHONEME

Pronunciation (US): (GB):

Meaning:

(linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Hypernyms ("phoneme" is a kind of...):

phone; sound; speech sound ((phonetics) an individual sound unit of speech without concern as to whether or not it is a phoneme of some language)

Domain category:

linguistics (the scientific study of language)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "phoneme"):

allophone ((linguistics) any of various acoustically different forms of the same phoneme)

Derivation:

phonemic (of or relating to phonemes of a particular language)