Phoneme

From Sphinx

The phonetic sub-units of speech that make up words. English has approximately 39 phonemes. Here is an example of words and their corresponding phonemes.

APARTMENT       AH P AA R T M AH N T
BASE    B EY S
BOOZE   B UW Z
CANTANKEROUS    K AE N T AE NG K ER AH S

So in the above example, AH, P, R and ER are all phonemes.