Grapheme
From Free net encyclopedia
In typography, a grapheme is the atomic unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese ideograms, numerals, punctuation marks, and other glyphs.
In a 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 — multiple graphemes may represent a single phoneme. These are called digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and 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 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
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