grapheme

«grapheme» in Mova's school dictionary: a letter or group of letters that stands for one sound… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 1 sentence of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (a grapheme, graphemes)

meaning for a pupil

A grapheme is a letter or group of letters that stands for one sound (phoneme) in writing, like «sh» in ship or «igh» in night. tree →

sense in the lessons

In English and phonics lessons in UK, Australian and New Zealand schools, children learn graphemes and the sounds they make. One sound can be written with different graphemes: the sound «ee» can be ee (see), ea (sea), e (me) or y (happy). Phrases: grapheme–phoneme correspondence (GPC), split grapheme (a_e in cake), digraph (two-letter grapheme), trigraph (three letters).

examples

• The word «ship» has three graphemes: sh, i, p. tree →
• «igh» in «light» is a three-letter grapheme. tree →
• The split grapheme a_e makes «cap» into «cape». tree →
• Our teacher put the new grapheme on the phonics wall. tree →
• How many graphemes are in the word «boat»? tree →
• The sound «f» can be spelled with the grapheme ph, as in phone. tree →

note

Countable. A phoneme is a sound; a grapheme is how it is written. A grapheme is not always one letter: «ch» is one grapheme of two letters. Counting graphemes is not the same as counting letters.

In the corpora

• A phoneme is one sound in a word; a grapheme is the letter or letters that write that sound.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «grapheme» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.