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Grapheme ▢ᦓ｜Definition｜1st｜20260120142551-00-⌔
Grapheme
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.1 The word grapheme is derived from Ancient Greek’s gráphō (‘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 in graphemic notation by enclosing it within angle brackets: e.g. ⟨a⟩.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
Coulmas, F. (1996), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 174 ↩
Secondary
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