phoneme

1. 1.

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

   Broaderphone

   Narrowerallophone

   linguistics

Other forms of phoneme

plural

phonemes·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about phoneme

What does phoneme mean?

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

How many syllables are in phoneme?

phoneme has 2 syllables: pho-neme. The stress falls on "pho". In IPA it is /ˈfoʊnim/.

Is phoneme a common word?

phoneme is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.