noun. The smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b of bat in English.

noun. Same as phone, n.

noun. A voice-sound imagined by the insane; a hallucination of voices.

noun. An indivisible unit of sound in a given language. A phoneme is an abstraction of the physical speech sounds (phones) and may encompass several different phones.

noun. (linguistics) one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language

"By the 2nd millennium BC, Mesopotamian script changed from pictographic to cuneiform writing (wedge shaped signs representing sounds instead of objects), and by around 2000BC the first true alphabetic system (where a phoneme is represented by a letter) appeared."

chereme  chroneme  grapheme  lexeme  listeme  

phonemic  phonetic  phonetically  phonetics  phonology  

phone  sound  speech sound  

allophone  

auto-arming  autodestruct  beastlike  challenge-response  feelie  

allophone  alveolar  apico-alveolar  apico-dental  articulation