What is sememe? How to use in English

The term "sememe" was coined by the ethnologist and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1960s. It was initially introduced in his book "The Elementary Structures of Kinship" as a way to describe the cultural units that carry meaning in human societies similar to the way genes carry biological information. Lévi-Strauss argued that like genes, sememes are passed down through generations and combine to form larger cultural structures, such as myths, beliefs, or social practices. The word "sememe" combines the prefix "semi-," meaning "partial" or "partial sign," with the suffix "-eme," signifying a unit of communication. The concept of sememes has since been applied in various fields beyond anthropology, including linguistics, semiotics, and cognitive science. In brief, a sememe is a culturally-based unit of meaning, analogous to a gene in biology, that combines with other sememes to create cultural systems and structures.