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 orthographic and related notations. For the notations ⟨ ⟩, / / and [ ] used in this article, see IPA Brackets and transcription delimiters.
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 (glyphs) 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 of 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]
^"allograph". The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (second ed.). Cambridge University Press. 1997. p. 196.
^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.
and transcription delimiters. In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme...
agent. An allograph may be the opposite of an autograph – i.e. a person's words or name (signature) written by someone else. In law, an allograph is a document...
apostrophe and period to create an exclamation mark. If there is more than one allograph of a unit of writing, and the choice between them depends on context or...
Che with hook (, ) is an allograph of the letter che with descender (Ҷ, ҷ) in the Cyrillic script. It has been used for the Surgut dialect of Khanty and...
Simplified Chinese characters are one of two standardized character sets widely used to write the Chinese language, with the other being traditional characters...
Ge with hook (, ) is an allograph of the letter ge with descender ⟨Ӷ ӷ⟩ of the Cyrillic script. It has been used in writing Ket and sometimes Nivkh, and...
Independence, stone blocks with depicted signatures Autograph show Law of agency#Allograph – Person representing another person in legal matters, and the laws enabling...
consonants, become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter.[citation needed] With the fragmentation of political power...
or on the Greek lowercase alpha (α). Although ⟨ɑ⟩ is normally just an allograph of ⟨a⟩, there are instances in which the two letters must be carefully...
individual variations are known as allographs of a grapheme. For example, the lowercase letter a has different allographs when written as a cursive, block...
inherent [ɔ] is orthographically realised by using a variety of vowel allographs above, below, before, after, or around the consonant sign, thus forming...
pronunciation. Variants of a given character are allographs of one another, and many are directly analogous to allographs present in the English alphabet, such as...
double hyphen is used as a functionally equivalent graphical variant (allograph) of the single hyphen, it has the same Unicode code point as a conventional...
tailed Z ⟨ʒ⟩, though distinct characters, can also be considered to be allographs of ⟨Z⟩/⟨z⟩. Tailed Z (German geschwänztes Z, also Z mit Unterschlinge)...
terminals and dot-matrix printers rendered the vertical bar character as the allograph broken bar ¦. This may have been to distinguish the character from the...
symbols (and different glyphs representing the same grapheme are called allographs). Thus, a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of...
intermittently and sometimes concurrently. In typography, the symbols are allographs – style choices – when used to represent the pound; consequently fonts...
forms (异体字; 異體字; yìtǐzì) emerge via several processes. Variant forms are allographs that represent the same underlying character, and correspond to the same...
/ɔː/, ⟨ew⟩ /(j)uː/, ⟨ow⟩ /aʊ, oʊ/, wherein it is usually an orthographic allograph of ⟨u⟩ in final positions. It is the fifteenth most frequently used letter...
reassignment, or Runic ᚦ) 𐌾 (j; derived from Latin G /ɡ/) 𐌿 (u; possibly an allograph of Greek Ο (cf. the numerical values), or from Runic ᚢ /u/) 𐍈 (ƕ; derived...
Novgorodian birchbark letters, along with other reversed letters. It is an allograph of Tse and denotes the same sound – voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate...
other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, which can be written ⟨a⟩. The italic and bold face...
lower-case Б. In some fonts, an allograph of Ʒ displays as turned Σ. In addition, the horseshoe ʊ ᶷ of the IPA has allographs that are a turned small-capital...
capital letters as allographs; the ʼn does not have a capital letter allograph. This means that Afrikaans has 88 graphemes with allographs in total. In Afrikaans...
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