Kirjoitusmerkki

Kirjoitusmerkki is a general term in Finnish that designates any symbol used in writing. It covers a wide range of signs that appear in printed or digital texts, including letters of an alphabet, numerals, punctuation marks, diacritics, ligatures, and other typographic symbols. The term is commonly used in discussions of orthography, typography, and text processing.

In practice, kirjoitusmerkit range from basic letters such as a, b, c and digits such as 0–9 to punctuation marks like period, comma, question mark, and exclamation point, as well as symbols used in mathematics, currency, and other scripts. Letters such as ä and ö are part of the Finnish alphabet and distinguish words; diacritics can modify pronunciation in some languages. Some signs belong to the writing system as letters, while others help structure sentences or convey meaning.

In computing and digital text, a kirjoitusmerkki corresponds to a character or code point in a character encoding such as Unicode. Text processing relies on correct handling of writing signs, including encoding, normalization, font support, and rendering. The concept is distinct from phonemes or words, focusing on the visual and symbolic units that constitute written language.