Sememe
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The smallest unit of meaning; especially, the meaning expressed by a morpheme.
"Any given word of a natural language in its shared acceptations represents a seme, sememe, or set of sememes, but the profile that we can compile as representing the shared elements in a list of synonymous and parasynonymous words is an artificial construct, an instance of meta-language, thus called a constructed sememe."
Example
More examples"Any given word of a natural language in its shared acceptations represents a seme, sememe, or set of sememes, but the profile that we can compile as representing the shared elements in a list of synonymous and parasynonymous words is an artificial construct, an instance of meta-language, thus called a constructed sememe."
Etymology
Ultimately from Ancient Greek σημαίνω (sēmaínō, “I signify, I mean”) + -eme. Compare morpheme.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.