Morphemes

A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning. A word can have one or more morphemes. It doesn't necessarily follow that the longer the word, the more morphemes it has. A word can be short and be made up of more morphemes than a very long word. For instance, the word "undo" has two morphemes-'un' and 'do' which by themselves have meanings, whereas the word 'symphony' has only one morpheme. This concept of morpheme is needed to easily understand affixes which would be the topic of my next post.