grapheme

See also: Grapheme and graphème

English

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

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

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

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

Noun

Examples (graphemes of the phoneme /f/)
f (as in fun) gh (as in rough) ph (as in philosopher)

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^[1], Routledge, →ISBN:

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

Derived terms

• grapheme-color

 

Translations

fundamental unit of a writing system

• Armenian: գրույթ (hy) (gruytʻ)
• Asturian: grafema m
• Balinese: ᬳᬓ᭄ᬲᬭᬩᬕ (aksarabaga)
• Belarusian: графе́ма f (hrafjéma)
• Bulgarian: графе́ма f (graféma)
• Catalan: grafema m
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 字素 (zh) (zìsù), 字位 (zìwèi)

• Czech: grafém m
• Dutch: grafeem (nl) n
• Esperanto: grafemo
• Estonian: please add this translation if you can
• Finnish: grafeemi (fi)
• French: graphème (fr) m
• Galician: grafema (gl) m
• Georgian: გრაფემა (grapema)
• German: Graphem (de) n
• Greek: γράφημα (el) n (gráfima)
• Hebrew: גְּרָפֶמָה f
• Hungarian: graféma
• Italian: grafema (it) m
• Japanese: 書記素 (しょきそ, shokiso), 字素 (じそ, jiso), 文字素 (もじそ, mojiso), 図形素 (ずけいそ, zukeiso)
• Kazakh: графема (grafema)
• Korean: 자소 (ko) (jaso), 문자소 (munjaso), 서기소 (seogiso)
• Macedonian: графема f (grafema)
• Malay: grafem
• Polish: grafem (pl) m
• Portuguese: grafema m
• Romanian: grafem (ro) n
• Russian: графе́ма (ru) f (graféma)
• Serbo-Croatian:

  Cyrillic: гра̀фе̄м m

  Roman: gràfēm (sh) m

• Sicilian: grafima m
• Slovak: graféma f
• Spanish: grafema (es) m
• Swedish: grafem (sv)
• Thai: หน่วยอักขระ (nùai-àk-kà-rà)
• Ukrainian: графе́ма f (hraféma)
• Urdu: ^{(please verify)} اکائی
• Vietnamese: tự vị (vi)

Further reading

• grapheme on Wikipedia.Wikipedia