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In typography, a 'grapheme' is the fundamental unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese characters, Japanese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and other glyphs.
In a phonemic 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.
Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme, meaning they are allographs. 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 in the phonological sense; for example the logogram ampersand (''&'') represents the Latin word ''et'' (English word ''and''), which contains two phonemes.

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See also

See also

★ Sign (semiotics)

★ Glyph

★ Digraph (orthography)

★ Trigraph (orthography)

★ Allograph (orthography)