Wiktionary
near-minimal pair
alt. (context linguistics English) A pair of words differing by a few (but more than one) phonetic segments or suprasegments, used to suggest a proposed phoneme, toneme, or chroneme may be valid. n. (context linguistics English) A pair of words differing by a few (but more than one) phonetic segments or suprasegments, used to suggest a proposed phoneme, toneme, or chroneme may be valid.