 Morphs are the basic building blocks of words. Here are two present-day English words. We get two morphs per word but since the representation is an orthographical one, we have to postulate two different morphs for the plural if we leave the base form intact. Thus we need a phonemic analysis where it becomes obvious that both words involve the same morph for the plural. Let us now expand the analysis. Here are three nouns with their phonemic representation. Their plural forms involve three different morphs but they have the same function. They all denote the plural form of a noun. Thus they are members of a family of morphs that vary in sound but not in meaning. Such family members are referred to as alomorphs and the head term is referred to as the morpheme. Morphs, alomorphs and the morpheme itself are all represented within curly brackets. The label for the morpheme, which is an abstract head term, can freely be chosen. For example, we can use the dot notation used in language typology and label it noun plural or we can simply select the alomorph that occurs most frequently as the label of the morpheme. In any case, morphemes are abstract head terms, morphs their actual realizations.