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🇮🇹Italian Source WordCode: IT

grafema

Pronunciation / Transliteration: ɡraˈfɛma

🇬🇧 Direct English Meaning:
Grapheme/ˈɡræf.iːm/
nounCEFR C2 (Proficient)Top #45000 frequency
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🇮🇹 Example Sentence in Italian:

"Il grafema rappresenta l'unità minima del sistema di scrittura."

Comprehensive Definitions & Senses

2 senses
As noun
  1. 1

    The smallest meaningful unit of a writing system, such as a letter, a part of a letter, or a combination of letters that represent a single phoneme.

    "In the English word 'chat', the letters 'ch' function as a single grapheme representing the sound /tʃ/."
  2. 2

    A fundamental distinctive graphic unit in any given script or orthography.

    "Comparative orthography studies how different languages map sounds to a specific set of graphemes."
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Antonyms & Contrasting Words (1)

Linguistic Origin & Historical Etymology

Coined in linguistics by analogy with phoneme, combining the Greek graphē (writing, drawing), derived from graphein (to write), with the suffix -eme used in linguistics to denote a fundamental unit. It entered academic and linguistic nomenclature in the mid-20th century to describe the smallest functional unit of a writing system.

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