digrafy

Digrafy is a term encountered in some linguistic and information-design discussions to denote the practice or study of encoding language or information using two-symbol units, typically digraphs. It is not a universally standardized term and appears mainly in niche or speculative contexts.

In linguistics, digrafy is closely related to the concept of digraphs—pairs of letters that represent a single sound or a specific phonetic sequence. The term can be used to describe the systematic design, analysis, or evaluation of writing systems that rely on digraphs rather than single-letter symbols.

The etymology of the word reflects its components: di- meaning two and -graphy meaning writing. The distinction from the more common term digraph is that digrafy refers to the broader practice, while digraph refers to the two-letter unit itself.

Applications of digrafy include orthography design for language documentation, revitalization, or transcription schemes that aim to capture phonology with digraph-based representations. In computational contexts, digrafy may describe encoding schemes using two-symbol units to compactly represent data or to provide redundancy in constrained communication channels.

Examples of widely recognized digraphs in many languages—such as ch, sh, th, ph, and ea—illustrate how two-letter sequences can carry distinct phonological or graphemic value. A digrafy-based orthography would, in principle, map each phoneme to a two-letter code, balancing phonetic transparency with writing economy.

See also: digraph, orthography, phonology, writing systems, data encoding.