Grapheme

[1] The word grapheme is derived from Ancient Greek gráphō ('write'), and the suffix -eme by analogy with phoneme and other emic units.

[2] In the so-called referential conception, graphemes are interpreted as the smallest units of writing that correspond with sounds (more accurately phonemes).

This referential concept is linked to the dependency hypothesis that claims that writing merely depicts speech.

This analogical concept is associated with the autonomy hypothesis which holds that writing is a system in its own right and should be studied independently from speech.

[9] In the same way that the surface forms of phonemes are speech sounds or phones (and different phones representing the same phoneme are called allophones), the surface forms of graphemes are glyphs (sometimes graphs), namely concrete written representations of symbols (and different glyphs representing the same grapheme are called allographs).

Similarly, the grapheme corresponding to "Arabic numeral zero" has a unique semantic identity and Unicode value U+0030 but exhibits variation in the form of slashed zero.

Capitals are generally found in certain triggering contexts that do not change the meaning of a word: a proper name, for example, or at the beginning of a sentence, or all caps in a newspaper headline.

Ancient logographic scripts often used silent determinatives to disambiguate the meaning of a neighboring (non-silent) word.

However, in some languages a multigraph may be treated as a single unit for the purposes of collation; for example, in a Czech dictionary, the section for words that start with ⟨ch⟩ comes after that for ⟨h⟩.