any of the minimal grammatical units of a language, each constituting a word or meaningful part of a word, that cannot be divided into smaller independent grammatical parts, as the, write, or the -ed of waited.Compare allomorph(def 2), morph(def 1).
"part of a word which contains the affixes," 1896, from German morpheme, coined 1895 by Polish-born linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929), from Greek morphe "form, shape" (see Morpheus), on analogy of phonème.
