Karl Jones: Created page with "In linguistics, a '''grapheme''' is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. == Description == An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by..."

2016-11-07T21:18:02Z

Created page with "In linguistics, a '''grapheme''' is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. == Description == An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by..."

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In linguistics, a '''grapheme''' is the smallest unit of a [[writing system]] of any given language.

== Description ==

An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, and may or may not correspond to a single phoneme of the spoken language. Graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual [[Symbol|symbols]].

The word ''grapheme'', coined in analogy with ''phoneme'', is derived from Greek γράφω (''gráphō''), meaning "write", and the suffix -eme, by analogy with phoneme and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called graphemics.

The concept of graphemes is an abstract one and similar to the notion in [[computing]] of a [[Character (computing)|character]].

By comparison, a specific shape that represents any particular grapheme in a specific [[typeface]] is called a [[glyph]]. For example, the grapheme corresponding to the abstract concept of "the Arabic numeral one" has two distinct glyphs (allographs) in the fonts Times New Roman and Helvetica.

== See also ==

* [[Conversion of scripts]]
* [[Character (computing)]]
* [[Grapheme–color synesthesia]]
* Grapheme–color [[ideasthesia]]
* [[Sign (semiotics)]]

== External links ==

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme Grapheme] @ Wikipedia

[[Category:Symbols]]
[[Category:Writing systems]]

Grapheme - Revision history

Karl Jones: Created page with "In linguistics, a '''grapheme''' is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. == Description == An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by..."