-emesuff. A distinctive unit of linguistic structure: semanteme.[French -ème, from phonème, phoneme; see phoneme.]American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.-eme suffix forming nouns linguistics indicating a minimal distinctive unit of a specified type in a language: morpheme; phoneme. [C20: via French, abstracted from phoneme]Collins English Dictionary ? Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014-eme a suffix used principally in linguistics to form nouns with the sense ?significant contrastive unit,? at the level of language specified by the stem: morpheme; grapheme. [extracted from phoneme] Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.