The smallest unit of a writing system that distinguishes one word from another, such as a letter or character in an alphabet or symbol in a logographic system.
From Greek 'graphe' (writing) plus the linguistic suffix '-eme' (minimal unit of meaning), coined in the 20th century following the pattern of 'phoneme' in linguistics.
A grapheme is to writing what a phoneme is to speech—the letter 'A' is one grapheme, but it can represent different sounds, and sometimes multiple graphemes combine to make one sound (like 'ch' or 'th'), showing how writing and sound don't align neatly.
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