Stafafjölda

Stafafjölda is the term used to describe the number of letters in a word or the length of a text in terms of letters. In linguistics, typography and information technology, stafafjöldi is used to quantify length, compare words, or set constraints for games, passwords, and data processing. In practice it can refer to the length of a single word or the total number of letters in a larger string.

Counting stafafjölda becomes nuanced when non‑spacing marks, ligatures, or multi‑character representations are involved. In Unicode, several ways exist to count: by code points, by grapheme clusters (what users perceive as a single letter), or by a user-defined notion of letters. Different methods can yield different results for the same text. Normalization forms such as NFC and NFD can also change the count by altering how characters with diacritics are represented.

In everyday use, counting by grapheme clusters often aligns with human perception of letters, especially for languages with diacritics or combining marks. Counting by code points or bytes may differ and can be important in technical contexts, data storage, or compatibility scenarios.

Applications of stafafjölda include enforcing minimum or maximum lengths in passwords and forms, conducting readability analyses, performing search indexing, and enabling word games or linguistic research. When working with Icelandic or other languages with extended alphabets, it's common to treat the full set of letters, including diacritics, as valid letters for accurate length measurement.

See also: Grapheme, Unicode, Character encoding, Word length.