A sememe (/ˈsɛmiːm/; from Ancient Greek σημαίνω (sēmaínō) 'mean, signify') is a semantic language unit of meaning, analogous to a morpheme.
Alternatively, a single sememe (for example [go] or [move]) can be conceived as the abstract representation of such verbs as skate, roll, jump, slide, turn, or boogie.
It can be thought of as the semantic counterpart to any of the following: a meme in a culture, a gene in a genome, or an atom (or, more generally, an elementary particle) in a substance.
A seme is the name for the smallest unit of meaning recognized in semantics, referring to a single characteristic of a sememe.
A related concept is that of the episememe (as described in the works of Leonard Bloomfield), which is a unit of meaning corresponding to the tagmeme.