a minimal meaningful unit of language, the meaning of which cannot be understood from that of its component morphemes. Take off (in the senses to mimic, to become airborne, etc) is a lexeme, as well as the independent morphemes take and off
Word origin
C20: from lex(icon) + -eme
lexeme in American English
(ˈlɛkˌsim)
noun
Linguistics
a word or stem that is a meaningful unit in a language and coincides with the abstract unit underlying a given set of inflected forms