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Morphemes

The smallest unit of word structure.

For example, dog consists of a single morpheme (dog), doghouse consists of two morphemes (dog) and (house), happiness consists of two morphemes (happy) and (-ness), and recrystallized consists of four morphemes (re-), (crystal), (-ize) and (-ed).

A particular morpheme may appear in more than one shape; these variant forms are the morpheme’s allomorphs. For example, the morpheme sane has one allomorph in sane and insane, but a different one in sanity.