Grapheme

A grapheme designates the atomic unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese ideograms, numerals, punctuation marks, and other symbols.

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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. An example of a trigraph is the tch in itch.

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Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme. 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; for example the logogram ampersand (&) represents the Latin word et (English word and), which contains two phonemes.

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Written language: A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system....

Letter: A letter is a written message from one party to another. Letters are usually intended to be received by someone far away. Before widespread availability of typewriters and computers, letters were always written by hand. Nowadays, letters are only widely used by companies who send out letters to larg...

Ideogram: Ideograms (from Greek ιδεα idea "idea" + γραφω grapho "to write") are said to be graphical symbols that represent words or morphemes. They are composed of visual elements arranged in a variety of ways, rather than using the segmental phoneme princip...