Littera

Littera is a Latin noun meaning a letter of the alphabet—the single symbol used in writing. In classical Latin, littera can refer to an individual character, while litterae (its plural) denotes the letters of an alphabet collectively. The plural sense also extends to literature or written correspondence, so phrases such as studia litterarum describe the humanities or learned letters. The word is the etymological source of many terms in Romance languages, such as French lettre, Italian lettera, and Spanish letra, and it underpins the English word literature.

In linguistic and typographic usage, a littera designates a grapheme or character. In typography, terms such as littera capitalis (capital letter) and littera minuscula (lowercase letter) describe uppercase and lowercase forms. In paleography and codicology, scholars study litterae to understand historical scripts, handwriting conventions, and the development of writing styles.

In modern contexts, the concept of a letter remains central to alphabetic writing systems and digital encoding. While the Latin word littera is primarily encountered in scholarly or historical discussions, the underlying idea—letters as distinct characters used to convey language—permeates linguistics, typography, and computing, where letters are represented as code points in fonts and character encoding standards such as Unicode.