morpheme

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The Word of the Day for August 28 is: 

morpheme   \MOR-feem\   noun
     : a word or part of a word that contains no smaller unit of meaning

Example sentence:
     The word "unloader" includes the morphemes "un-," "load," and "-er."

Did you know?
     Morphemes are the indivisible basic units of language, much like the atoms 
which physicists once assumed were the indivisible units of matter. English 
speakers borrowed "morpheme" from French "morpheme," which was itself created 
from the Greek root "morphe," meaning "form." The French borrowed "-eme" from 
their word "phoneme," which, like English "phoneme," means "a basic unit of 
speech that distinguishes one utterance from another." The French suffix and 
its English equivalent "-eme" are used to create words that refer to 
distinctive units of language structure. Words formed from "-eme" include 
"lexeme" ("a meaningful linguistic unit in the vocabulary of a language"), 
"grapheme" ("a unit of a writing system"), and "toneme" ("a unit of intonation 
in a language in which variations in tone distinguish meaning").