phonemes

• plural

  plural

  The grammatical form denoting more than one person, place, thing, or idea.

  of phoneme.
  phoneme

  noun

  any of a small set of units, usually about 20 to 60 in number, and different for each language, considered to be the basic distinctive units of speech sound by which morphemes, words, and sentences are represented. They are arrived at for any given language by determining which differences in sound function to indicate a difference in meaning, so that in English the difference in sound and meaning between pit and bit is taken to indicate the existence of different labial phonemes, while the difference in sound between the unaspirated p of spun and the aspirated p of pun, since it is never the only distinguishing feature between two different words, is not taken as ground for setting up two different p phonemes in English.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

phonemes

Second, lip movement is closely tied to speech sounds, which change rapidly and depend on complex sequences of phonemes.

From Science Daily ● Jan. 16, 2026

"We can capture the tone, the character, the style, the phonemes, and even if you have an accent, we can capture that as well," he told the Future Visionaries podcast in 2021.

From BBC ● Aug. 31, 2024

According to Rendell, the evidence shows whales are mainly repeating the same phoneme over and over again instead of actually combining varieties of phonemes into complex words.

From Salon ● Aug. 23, 2024

The AI decodes words from phonemes — the subunits of speech that form spoken words.

From Scientific American ● Aug. 24, 2023

It makes pellets out of phonemes, implies that the deep structures of grammar are made of something like cement.

From "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas

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