Grapheme

A grapheme, also known as a graph for short, is a written mark which corresponds to a spoken sound, or a bit of written language (orthography). It roughly corresponds to a phoneme in speech.Technically, "the smallest semantically distinguishable unit".

Graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems. The separate items on a keyboard all produce graphemes when writing in the appropriate software.

A grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, and may or may not correspond to a single phoneme.

A grapheme is an abstract concept. A glyph is a specific shape that represents that grapheme, in a specific typeface. For example, the abstract concept of "the Arabic numeral one" is a grapheme which has different glyphs in different typefaces.

 Notes 

Category:Typography
Category:Writing