(ˈfəʊniːm)
noun
Linguistics. One of the set of speech sounds in any given language that serve to distinguish one word from another. A phoneme may consist of several phonetically distinct articulations, which are regarded as identical by native speakers, since one articulation may be substituted without any change of meaning. Thus /p/ & /b/ are separate phonemes in English because they distinguish such words as pet & bet, whereas the light & dark /l/ sounds in little are not separate phonemes since they may be transposed without changing meaning.
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