the smallest indivisible unit of language that has a meaning, e.g. ‘cat’ or the various elements of a word such as ‘lovingly’, which is composed of three morphemes, ‘love’, ‘-ing’, and ‘-ly’, realized in speech and writing by a morph2: compare lexeme
morphemic /mawʹfeemik/ adj
morphemically /mawʹfeemikli/ adv
[French morphème from Greek morphē form (as in phonème phoneme)]