any one of the set of smallest units in a writing system that represents a speech sound and can make the difference between one word and another. In English, the ‘s’ in sip and the ‘sh’ in ship represent two different graphemes. compare phoneme字位,书写单位(语言书写系统的最小有意义单位) Word Origin1930s: from graph ‘a visual symbol representing a unit of sound or other feature of speech’ + -eme.