grafemes

Grafeme is a term used in linguistics and typography to denote the graphical form that realizes a grapheme in a written system. It is the concrete sign visible in a script—the letters, symbols, or glyphs produced by a font or handwriting. The grapheme is the abstract unit representing a unit of meaning or a phoneme; the grafeme is its visual realization in a particular script or style. In practice, a single grapheme may have multiple grafemes depending on font, calligraphic tradition, or script. Conversely, a single grafeme can encode more than one grapheme in some contexts, such as ligatures that merge two characters into one visible sign or diacritic-bearing variants that alter the base form.

In digital text, Unicode code points correspond to abstract characters (graphemes), while the actual grafemes that render on screen vary by font and rendering engine. Font designers create grafemes as glyphs, taking care to ensure legibility, spacing, and stylistic consistency. Grafemes are central to topics such as typography, optical character recognition, and script design, where precise graphical realization matters for readability and recognition.

The term grafeme is less common in everyday usage and can be overlapping with glyph or grapheme depending on scholarly context. It is most often encountered in discussions of orthography, font technology, and script-specific conventions.

See also: grapheme, glyph, ligature, font, Unicode, orthography.