grapheme

From Ancient Greek γράφω (gráphō, “write”) + -eme. Doublet of -gram.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈɡɹæ.fiːm/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈɡɹæ.fim/
• Hyphenation: gra‧pheme‧graph‧eme

grapheme (plural graphemes)

1. A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean Hangeul.
   • 2000, Richard Sproat, A Computational Theory of Writing Systems, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 28:

     For instance, it is convenient to refer to a single Chinese character as being a grapheme in some contexts.

2. (Unicode) A sequence of one or more code points that are processed and displayed as a single graphical unit of a writing system.

   Synonym: (formally) grapheme cluster

   Coordinate term: glyph

   • 2003, Richard Gillam, chapter 4, in Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer's Guide to the Encoding Standard, Addison-Wesley Professional, →ISBN, page 118:

     Even so, it's important for Unicode-friendly applications to deal with text in their user interfaces as a series of graphemes and not as a series of Unicode code points […]

3. (linguistics) In alphabetic writing, the shortest group of letters composing a phoneme.
   • [1987, David Caplan, Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasiology: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 234:

     The term for a letter or combination of letters which represents a particular sound is a “grapheme”. Languages like Italian and Serbo-Croatian have very simple “grapheme–phoneme conversion” rules.]

   • 2019, Flavia Belpoliti, Encarna Bermejo, Spanish Heritage Learners' Emerging Literacy: Empirical Research and Classroom Practice‎, Routledge, →ISBN:

     In terms of specific graphemes, Table 2.5 identifies the most frequent inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme patterns.

• grapheme on Wikipedia.Wikipedia