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How can minimal pairs such as “pit” and “bit” show that two sounds represent different phonemes?

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Diagram of a human head in profile showing the location of vocal organs and possible places of articulation for speech sounds, with labels for lips, teeth, tongue, palate, uvula, pharynx, and vocal cords, and numbered regions corresponding to types of articulation such as bilabial, alveolar, and velar.
phonetics Diagram depicting the location of human vocal organs and possible places of articulation used for speech.

Minimal pairs, such as "pit" and "bit," are essential tools in linguistics for identifying distinct phonemes. A minimal pair consists of two words that differ by only a single sound in the same position while maintaining different meanings.1

Because the substitution of the initial sound—/p/ in "pit" versus /b/ in "bit"—results in a change in word meaning, linguists conclude that these sounds function as separate [phonemes]. If the two sounds were merely variants of the same phoneme (known as allophones), replacing one with the other would not change the word's identity. By demonstrating that a single phonetic difference is sufficient to distinguish one word from another, minimal pairs provide empirical evidence that those sounds are contrastive units within the language's sound system.21