Grapheme

Various glyphs representing the lower case letter "a"; they are allographs of the grapheme ⟨a⟩

In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.[1] The word grapheme is derived from Ancient Greek γράφω (gráphō) '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 abstract and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a specific shape that represents any particular grapheme in a given typeface is called a glyph.

  1. ^ Coulmas, F. (1996), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 174