Explore Grapheme through 10+ example sentences from English, with an explanation of the meaning and related words like character. Ideal for language learners, writers and word enthusiasts.
Grapheme meaning
- A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean hangul.
- A sequence of one or more code points that are processed and displayed as a single graphical unit of a writing system.
- In alphabetic writing, the shortest group of letters composing a phoneme.
Synonyms of Grapheme
Using Grapheme
- The main meaning on this page is: A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean hangul. | A sequence of one or more code points that are processed and displayed as a single graphical unit of a writing system. | In alphabetic writing, the shortest group of letters composing a phoneme.
- Useful related words include: character, graphic symbol, written symbol, printed symbol.
- In the example corpus, grapheme often appears in combinations such as: grapheme may, single grapheme, the grapheme.
Context around Grapheme
- Average sentence length in these examples: 23.6 words
- Position in the sentence: 2 start, 9 middle, 3 end
- Sentence types: 14 statements, 0 questions, 0 exclamations
Corpus analysis for Grapheme
- In this selection, "grapheme" usually appears in the middle of the sentence. The average example has 23.6 words, and this corpus slice is mostly made up of statements.
- Around the word, single, individual, exact, may, phoneme and correspondences stand out and add context to how "grapheme" is used.
- Recognizable usage signals include a segmental grapheme for s and a single grapheme in the. That gives this page its own corpus information beyond isolated example sentences.
- By corpus frequency, "grapheme" sits close to words such as aaaa, abductees and abdulahi, which helps place it inside the broader word index.
Example types with grapheme
The same corpus examples are grouped by length and sentence type, making it easier to see the contexts in which the word appears:
Phoneme – grapheme correspondences as cues to spelling improvement. (8 words)
Some letters are not part of any grapheme, but function as etymological markers. (13 words)
These materials have demonstrated superior performance as compared to commercially available carbon, grapheme, and carbon nanotubes. (16 words)
A phoneme may be represented by a multigraph (sequence of more than one grapheme), as the digraph sh represents a single sound in English (and sometimes a single grapheme may represent more than one phoneme, as with the Russian letter я ). (41 words)
Coulmas, F. (1996), The Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, Oxford: Blackwells, p.174 An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, and may or may not correspond to a single phoneme of the spoken language. (39 words)
The Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster. (33 words)
Example sentences (14)
A phoneme may be represented by a multigraph (sequence of more than one grapheme), as the digraph sh represents a single sound in English (and sometimes a single grapheme may represent more than one phoneme, as with the Russian letter я ).
In computing as well as typography, the term " character " refers to a grapheme or grapheme-like unit of text, as found in natural language writing systems (scripts).
Coulmas, F. (1996), The Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, Oxford: Blackwells, p.174 An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, and may or may not correspond to a single phoneme of the spoken language.
Each grapheme may represent a limited number of phonemes depending on etymology and location in the word.
For example, different forms of the letter "b" are all considered to represent a single grapheme in the orthography of, say, English.
In practice, however, the orthographies of such languages entail at least a certain amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence.
In Spanish and several other world languages influenced by it, the grapheme ñ represents a palatal nasal consonant.
Phoneme – grapheme correspondences as cues to spelling improvement.
Phonology Vowels As in Italian, the grapheme i appears in some digraphs and trigraphs in which it does not represent the phonemic vowel.
Some letters are not part of any grapheme, but function as etymological markers.
The Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster.
The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme -to-phoneme conversion.
These materials have demonstrated superior performance as compared to commercially available carbon, grapheme, and carbon nanotubes.
The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet has no diacritics, instead it has a grapheme ( glyph ) for every letter of its Latin counterpart (including Latin letters with diacritics and the digraphs dž, lj and nj ).
Common combinations with grapheme
These word pairs occur most frequently in English texts: