bokstav

Bokstav is a term used in Scandinavian languages to denote a letter of the alphabet—a symbol used to represent a sound or phoneme in written language. In Swedish, bokstav is the common word for “letter.” The Danish and Norwegian equivalents are bogstav and bokstav, respectively. The concept covers individual glyphs that make up a script, whether they are consonants, vowels, or diacritic marks.

Etymology and scope: The word combines elements meaning “book” and “staff” or “stick,” reflecting an old idea of marks used in writing. Today, bokstav refers to any basic unit of an alphabet in a given language, and it can have uppercase and lowercase forms as part of a script.

Usage and typography: Letters are the foundational units of orthography. A language’s set of letters, together with diacritics and ligatures, determines its alphabet. Letters can be combined into syllables and words, and they are organized in alphabetical order for indexing and learning. In linguistics, the term grapheme describes the abstract unit, while a letter is a concrete glyph used in a particular writing system.

Computing and encoding: In digital text, letters are encoded as code points in character encodings such as Unicode. For example, the Latin capital letter A is U+0041, and the Latin small letter a is U+0061. Modern keyboards and fonts map these code points to visible bokstavs.

Examples: The Swedish alphabet adds Å, Ä, and Ö to the basic Latin set, totaling 29 letters. Bokstavs are used across languages to spell, index, and convey meaning in written communication.