grapheme

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See also: Grapheme and graphème

English

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

Noun

Examples (graphemes of the phoneme /f/)

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.
  • 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.

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