Phoneme
From KneeQuickie
A phoneme is an abstract, theoretical unit of sound possible in a language encompassing any number of realizations. Phonemes are to be distinguished from phones, which are the concrete sounds emitted from the mouth. A given phoneme has one or more phone realizations, known as allophones.
A distinction between two phones is phonemic if and only if the phones belong to distinct phonemes.
A phonemic transcription indicates the phonemes that go into a speech utterance, rather than the actual phones. Phonemic transcriptions are often written inside forward slashes, e.g. /p{t/.
