The Synesthesia Tree: Lexeme-colour and morpheme-colour

These subtypes are closely related to grapheme-colour synesthesia.

Words are made up of different parts: the lexeme or root, and one or more morphemes. The morpheme is the part of the word that is joined to the lexeme to add grammatical meaning (tense, person, number, etc).

MILLION (lexeme)

MILLIONS (lexeme + morpheme)

MILLIONAIRE (lexeme + morpheme)

MULTIMILLIONAIRE (morpheme + lexeme + morpheme)

Some cases of grapheme-colour synesthesia are actually lexeme-colour and morpheme-colour: the synesthete in question perceives the root or lexeme of the word as having one colour and the morpheme (the suffix, for example) as having another. According to the study "Multicolored words: Uncovering the relationship between reading mechanisms and synesthesia" (L. J. Blazej and A.M. Cohen-Goldberg, Tufts University, 2015), 14% of people who have grapheme-colour synesthesia might actually have this type.

In any case, when a synesthete perceives or associates colours with letters or words the general term “grapheme-colour synesthesia” is normally used, rather than the more specific terms phoneme-colour, lexeme-colour or morpheme-colour.

Go to the page on grapheme-colour synesthesia

Go to the page on phoneme-colour synesthesia

This page is about lexeme-color synesthesia and morpheme-color synesthesia

This page is about lexeme-colour synaesthesia and morpheme-colour synaesthesia

2 comments:

AnonymousFebruary 15, 2024 at 5:50 PM
For me, some words and names start with one color and end with another, like a gradient. The name "Emilly", for example, is yellow at the beginning and pink at the end.
AnonymousOctober 14, 2025 at 8:31 AM
For me, words tend to be defined by the letter at the start of them, but only if it’s a capital letter. For example ‘Book’ is brown because of the capital B, but ‘book’ tends to not be brown as the b is lowercase. Also, words of colours do not count, as they are associated with that colour. Like “red” would be brown/orange but it is red because it’s the name of the colour.