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Allograph

This article is about the term used in graphemics and typography. For the practice of writing one language in the script of another, see Garshunography. For the meaning of the term in the law of agency, see Law of agency § Allograph.
⟨g⟩ rendered with or without a looptail are allographs of each other
This page uses notation for orthographic or other linguistic analysis. For the meaning of how ⟨ ⟩, | |, / /, and [ ] are used here, see this page.

In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme, such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious example in English (and many other writing systems) is the distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters. Allographs can vary greatly, without affecting the underlying identity of the grapheme. Even if the word "cat" is rendered as "cAt", it remains recognizable as the sequence of the three graphemes ⟨c⟩, ⟨a⟩, ⟨t⟩.[1]

Letters and other graphemes can also have significant variations that may be missed by many readers. The letter g, for example, has two common forms in different typefaces, and a wide variety in people's handwriting. A positional example of allography is the long s |ſ|, a symbol which was once a widely used as a non-final allograph for the lowercase letter s.

A grapheme variant can acquire a separate meaning in a specialized writing system, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet used in linguistics. Several such variants have distinct code points in Unicode and thus are not allographs for some applications.[2]

  1. ^ "allograph". The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (second ed.). Cambridge University Press. 1997. p. 196.
  2. ^ Kumar, Sanjeev (2012-10-15). "A Comparative Study of UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 of Unicode Code Point". The IUP Journal of Telecommunications. IV (2). Rochester, NY: 50–59. SSRN 2161812.

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