Phonemic

//fəˈniː.mɪk// adj

adj ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Relating to phonemes. not-comparable

    "We've finished our phonemic analysis and we're ready to move on to morphology."

  2. 2
    Relating to a difference between sounds that can change the meaning of words in a language. not-comparable

    "Tone is phonemic in Chinese."

  3. 3
    Corresponding precisely and consistently with the phonemes. not-comparable

    "Spanish orthography is highly phonemic: you can tell exactly how the words sound just by looking at how they are spelled."

Adjective
  1. 1
    of or relating to phonemes of a particular language wordnet
Adverb
  1. 1
    by phonemics wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
accentedalveolarapicalapico-alveolarapico-dentalarticulated

Example

More examples

"All children in the PRC learn the Roman alphabet for phonemic pinyin."

Etymology

From phoneme + -ic.

Related phrases

phonemic mergerphonemic split

More for "phonemic"

SynonymsSentencesPronunciationTranslate

Next best steps

Find stronger synonymsSee usage examplesCheck pronunciationBrowse writing guides

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