Dictionary of Meaning

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Grapheme

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In typography, a '''grapheme''' is the atomic unit in writing systems written language. Graphemes include letter (alphabet) letters, Chinese ideograms, numerals, punctuation marks, and other glyphs. In a phonology phonological orthography, a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme. In spelling systems that are non-phonemic — such as the spellings used most widely for written English language English — multiple graphemes may represent a single phoneme. These are called digraph (orthography) digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and trigraph (orthography) trigraphs (three graphemes). For example, the word ''ship'' contains four graphemes (''s'', ''h'', ''i'', and ''p'') but only three phonemes, because ''sh'' is a digraph. An example of a trigraph is the ''tch'' in ''itch''. Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme, meaning they are allography allographs. For example, the minuscule letter ''a'' can be seen in two variants, with a hook at the top, and without. Not all glyphs are graphemes; for example the logogram ampersand (''&'') represents the Latin word ''et'' (English word ''and''), which contains two phonemes.

See also
*Digraph (orthography) *Trigraph (orthography) *Allograph (orthography) *Tilde Category:Linguistics af:Grafeem bg:Буква de:Graphem als:Buchstabe fr:Graphème hu:betű it:Grafema pl:Grafem pt:Grafema ru:Буква sl:grafem sv:Grafem zh-min-nan:Grapheme