grapheme
/ˈɡɹæ.fiːm/
"grapheme" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“grapheme” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 8
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean hangul.
Corpus desk
Index EN-grapheme · grapheme · English
grapheme · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 8 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "G" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | grapheme |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈɡɹæ.fiːm/ |
| Letters | 8 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “grapheme” in English
Rare enough to double-check
grapheme is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed /ˈɡɹæ.fiːm/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for grapheme, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Ancient Greek γράφω (gráphō, “write”) + -eme. Doublet of -gram. The correct English form is grapheme, spelled G-R-A-P-H-E-M-E.
Definition
- 1A fundamental unit of a writing system, corresponding to (for example) letters in the English alphabet or jamo in Korean hangul.
- 2A sequence of one or more code points that are processed and displayed as a single graphical unit of a writing system.
- 3In alphabetic writing, the shortest group of letters composing a phoneme.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how grapheme appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
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 […]
Etymology
From Ancient Greek γράφω (gráphō, “write”) + -eme. Doublet of -gram.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.