Chroneme

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant.

Etymology

From Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos) + -eme, a suffix indicating a fundamental unit in some aspect of linguistic structure, extracted from phoneme, from Ancient Greek φώνημα (phṓnēma, “sound”), from φωνέω (phōnéō, “to sound”), from φωνή (phōnḗ, “sound”). By surface analysis, chrono- + -eme.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.