Etymology · Ancient Greek
φώνημα
3 English words descend from Ancient Greek φώνημα, most common first.
- phonemeAn indivisible unit of sound in a given language. A phoneme is an abstraction of the physical speech sounds (phones) and may encompass several different phones.
- chronemeA basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant.
- -emeIndicating a fundamental unit in some kind of structure, chiefly linguistic structure.