Grapheme

//ˈɡɹæ.fiːm// noun

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean hangul.

    "For instance, it is convenient to refer to a single Chinese character as being a grapheme in some contexts."

  2. 2
    a written symbol that is used to represent speech wordnet
  3. 3
    A sequence of one or more code points that are processed and displayed as a single graphical unit of a writing system.

    "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 […]"

  4. 4
    In alphabetic writing, the shortest group of letters composing a phoneme.

    "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."

Etymology

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

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