In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful or more formally, grammatical unit of a language. Morphemes can be standalone words, called free morphemes, or they can be word fragments, often affixes, that can only appear as part of a word. These are called bound morphemes. Every word is made up of one or more morphemes.
Free morphemes are words like dog, house, and truck. Some examples of bound morphemes include suffixes like -s, meaning the morpheme it is bound to is plural or -ed, which indicates the morpheme it is bound to is past tense.
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