Phoneme

//ˈfəʊ.niːm// noun

noun ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An indivisible unit of sound in a given language. A phoneme is an abstraction of the physical speech sounds (phones) and may encompass several different phones.

    "It is crucial for the phoneme structure of Finnish — traditionally /d/ has not been included in the Finnish phonotax, but it fulfils the criteria of a phoneme (Karlsson, 1983: 66-7)."

  2. 2
    (linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
allophonealveolarapico-alveolarapico-dentalarticulationaspiration

Example

More examples

"Say which of the following groups of phonemes contains one which is not an English phoneme."

Etymology

From Ancient Greek φώνημα (phṓnēma, “sound”), from φωνέω (phōnéō, “to sound”), from φωνή (phōnḗ, “sound”). By surface analysis, phone (“speech sound”) + -eme (“unit”).

Related phrases

grapheme-phoneme correspondence

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