Vowelligature

Vowelligature is a term used to describe a typographic ligature formed when two or more vowel letters are joined into a single glyph. It contrasts with consonant ligatures and with digraphs or trigraphs that merely represent a vowel sequence in ordinary type. In this sense, vowelligature refers to both a historical writing practice and a modern typographic feature found in certain fonts.

Historically, vowelligatures arose in manuscripts as a way to save space or to create a decorative, legible hand. The most familiar examples in Latin-script typography are the æ ligature (ae) and the œ ligature (oe). These forms appear in older English and French texts (for example, encyclopaedia or œuvre) and continue to be used in some modern languages for stylistic or traditional purposes. In contemporary typography, many fonts provide these as optional ligatures, enabling designers to substitute a single glyph for the two letters in appropriate contexts.

In digital typography, vowelligatures can be encoded as precomposed characters, such as æ (U+00E6) and œ (U+0153), or produced via font features called ligatures (liga), which map letter sequences to single glyphs. Because ligatures are typographic choices rather than separate letters of the alphabet, their use is governed by typography goals, language conventions, and encoding compatibility.

See also ligature, digraph, and font typography.