Grapheme
A grapheme designates the atomic unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese ideograms, numerals, Punctuation marks, and other symbols.
In a phonological Orthography a grapheme corresponds to one Phoneme. In spelling systems that are non-phonemic - such as the spellings used most widely for written English - multiple graphemes may represent a single phoneme. These are called digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and trigraphs (three graphemes). For example, the word ship contains four graphemes (s, h, i, and p) but only three phonemes, because sh is a digraph. An example of a trigraph is the tch in itch.
Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme. For example, the Minuscule letter A can be seen in two variants, with a hook at the top, and without. Not all glyphs are graphemes; for example the Logogram Ampersand (&) represents the Latin word et (English word and), which contains two phonemes.
See also
External link
- phonemic awareness