Grapheme
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.
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 in the phonological sense; for example the
logogram ampersand (
&) represents the Latin word
et (English word
and), which contains two phonemes.
*
Sign (semiotics)*
Glyph*
Digraph (orthography)*
Trigraph (orthography)*
Allograph (orthography)
