grapheme

Etymology

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

noun

1. A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean Hangeul.
   For instance, it is convenient to refer to a single Chinese character as being a grapheme in some contexts. 2000, Richard Sproat, A Computational Theory of Writing Systems, Cambridge University Press, page 28
2. (Unicode) A sequence of one or more code points that are processed and displayed as a single graphical unit of a writing system.
   Coordinate term: glyph
   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 […] 2003, Richard Gillam, chapter 4, in Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer's Guide to the Encoding Standard, Addison-Wesley Professional, page 118
3. (linguistics) 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.] [1987, David Caplan, Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasiology: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, page 234
   In terms of specific graphemes, Table 2.5 identifies the most frequent inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme patterns. 2019, Flavia Belpoliti, Encarna Bermejo, Spanish Heritage Learners' Emerging Literacy: Empirical Research and Classroom Practice, Routledge