Morphology is the study of morphemes, which are the smallest unit of meaning in a language. A morpheme can be one whole word or a prefix or suffix that is understood to change the meaning of the word and therefore takes on meaning itself. Morphology includes the concepts of inflection and derivation, which allow words to be made plural or for the tense of a word to be changed. The study of morphology attempts to understand how people use and understand the way that words work, in an attempt to understand the difference that one morpheme makes to many words and how words relate to each other.