Morphemes in “leadership”
“leadership” has 3 morphemes: lead + -er + -ship.
Spelling changes when the parts join: the boxes show the letters as written; the morphemes themselves are lead + -er + -ship.
Each morpheme explained
| Morpheme | Type | Free / bound | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| lead | free root | free | an advantage held by a competitor in a race |
| -er | inflectional suffix | bound | more (comparative) |
| -ship | derivational suffix | bound | state, position or skill of |
How the word is built
lead → leader → leadership
Each step adds one affix to the word before it; the root “lead” is where the chain starts.
Morphemes are not syllables
Morphemes are units of meaning; syllables are units of sound. The boundaries often fall in different places, which is why “leadership” splits one way for a morphology exercise and another for a syllable count.
Break any word into morphemes
Prefixes, roots and suffixes with glosses, free and in your browser.
Open the morphological analyzer →Related words
Segmentation derived from MorphyNet (Batsuren, Bella & Giunchiglia, 2021; CC BY-SA 3.0, built from Wiktionary), with hand-written affix glosses and root meanings from WordNet. Reviewed for classroom use; tell us if you spot an error.