grapheme
/ˈɡɹæ.fim/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.93 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
4
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean hangul.
noun
A sequence of one or more code points that are processed and displayed as a single graphical unit of a writing system.
Example Sentences
- "For instance, it is convenient to refer to a single Chinese character as being a grapheme in some contexts."
- "Even so, it's important for Unicode-friendly applications to deal with text in their user interfaces as a series of graphemes and not as a series of Unicode code points […]"
- "The term for a letter or combination of letters which represents a particular sound is a “grapheme”. Languages like Italian and Serbo-Croatian have very simple “grapheme–phoneme conversion” rules."
- "In terms of specific graphemes, Table 2.5 identifies the most frequent inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme patterns."
Etymology
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: γράφω
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈɡɹæ.fim/
- British English: /ˈɡɹæ.fiːm/