Grapheme

In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.[1] The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phoneme, is derived from Ancient Greek γράφω (gráphō) 'write' and the suffix -eme by analogy with phoneme and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called graphemics.

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The concept of graphemes is abstract and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a specific shape that represents any particular grapheme in a specific typeface is called a glyph. For example, the grapheme corresponding to the abstract concept of "the Arabic numeral one" has a distinct glyph with identical meaning (an allograph) in each of many typefaces (such as, for example, a serif form as in Times New Roman and a sans-serif form as in Helvetica).