Dictionary

sememe en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /ˈsɛmiːm/
• (Southern-England) audio

Etymology

Ultimately from Ancient Greek σημαίνω (sēmaínō, “I signify, I mean”) + -eme. Compare morpheme.

Meanings

1. The smallest unit of meaning; especially, the meaning expressed by a morpheme.
   • Any given word of a natural language in its shared acceptations represents a seme, sememe, or set of sememes, but the profile that we can compile as representing the shared elements in a list of synonymous and parasynonymous words is an artificial construct, an instance of meta-language, thus called a constructed sememe. 1995, Louise Schleiner, Cultural Semiotics, Spenser, and the Captive Woman, Lehigh University Press, page 71:
   • HowNet organizes all the sememes into several trees, and each sememe is considered a node of a tree. 2014, Jia-Fei Hong, Verb Sense Discovery in Mandarin Chinese—A Corpus based Knowledge-Intensive Approach, Springer, page 58:
   • Since sememes are enhanced in the sememe network (as shown in Fig. 3), both a topic and an article analysis can rely on the sememe network instead of explicit term matching. 2007, Edward H. Y. Lim, Raymond S. T. Lee, “iJADE Infoseeker: On Using Intelligent Context-Aware Agents for Retrieving and Analyzing Chinese Web Articles”, in Raymond S. T. Lee, Vincenzo Loia, editors, Computational Intelligence for Agent-based Systems, Springer, page 138:

Forms

Deriveds

sememics · sememically · episememe · sememic

Relateds

monoseme · semantic · seme

Translations (14)

pl semem (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · hu szeméma (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · fi semeemi (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · es semema (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · fr sémème (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · ru семанте́ма (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · de Semem (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · ru семе́ма (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · pt semema (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · vi nghĩa vị (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · eo sememo (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · it semema (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · ja 意義素 (smallest unit of linguistical meaning) · cmn 義位 /义位 (smallest unit of linguistical meaning)