Grapheme

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

Related Topics:
Written language - Letter - Ideogram - Numeral - Punctuation

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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.

Related Topics:
Phonological - Orthography - Phoneme - English - Digraph - Trigraph

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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.

Related Topics:
Glyph - Minuscule - A - Logogram - Ampersand

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~