phoneme
pho.neme \'fo--.ne-m\ n [F phone'me, fr. Gk pho-ne-mat-, pho-ne-ma speec]h sound, utterance, fr. pho-nein to sound : a member of the set of the smallest units of speech that serve to distin guish one utterance from another in a language or dialect {the p of English pin and the f of English fin are two different ~s}