grapheme
Sign in to savethumb|Various glyphs representing instances of the lower case letter , considered to be [[allographs of the same grapheme|class=skin-invert-image]]
AI overview
A grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system—like a letter or character that represents sound or meaning. The image shows how the same grapheme (the letter "a") can look different in various handwriting or font styles, yet we still recognize it as the same letter.
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Article
8 sectionsContents
- Conceptualization
- Notation
- Glyphs
- Types of grapheme
- Relationship with phonemes
- See also
- References
- External links
thumb|Various glyphs representing instances of the lower case letter , considered to be [[allographs of the same grapheme|class=skin-invert-image]]
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word grapheme is derived from Ancient Greek's ('write'), and the suffix -eme (by analogy with phoneme and other emic units). The study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of a grapheme is abstract; it is similar to the notion of a character in computing. (A specific geometric shape that represents any particular grapheme in a given typeface is called a glyph.) In orthographic and linguistic notation, a particular glyph (character) is represented as a grapheme (is used in its graphemic sense) by enclosing it within angle brackets: e.g. .