ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Grapheme

Definition, Meaning & Examples

Pronunciation /ˈɡɹæ.fiːm/ · Part of speech noun

Quick meaning: Grapheme is a noun meaning A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean hangul.

Meaning

A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean hangul.

More Meanings

  1. (Unicode) A sequence of one or more code points that are processed and displayed as a single graphical unit of a writing system.
  2. (linguistics) In alphabetic writing, the shortest group of letters composing a phoneme.

Example Sentences

For instance, it is convenient to refer to a single Chinese character as being a grapheme in some contexts.
In terms of specific graphemes, Table 2.5 identifies the most frequent inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme patterns.
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 […]
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.

Word Forms

Synonyms for grapheme

Depending on context, synonyms include character.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include character, phoneme, correspondences, graph, jamo, logographeme.

Related Dictionary Tools

Sources & Attribution

FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary data is provided by FreeDictionaryAPI.com and sourced from Wiktionary under its stated license.