grapheme: an orthographic element, especially a letter of an alphabet or a symbol representing a syllable in a syllabary. For example the letter "b", in any of the forms it may be written (capitalized or not, printed or cursive, bold-faced or italic, etc.) is a single grapheme. Ideally, each phoneme should be represented by only one grapheme, and each grapheme should represent only one phoneme. [Spanish: grafema]