glyph

A glyph is the visual shape that represents a character, symbol, or other mark in a particular font or typeface. In typography and digital text, a glyph is the concrete rendering of a code point or sequence of code points, while the character or code point refers to the abstract symbol itself. Thus, the same character can have different glyphs in different fonts, and many glyphs can represent the same character in different contexts or styles.

In digital typography, fonts store a collection of glyphs, each associated with one or more code points. A rendering system uses a shaping process to map input characters to the appropriate glyphs, applying substitutions, diacritics, and contextual forms as needed. Glyphs can be plain letters, numerals, punctuation, ligatures (combined glyphs for two or more characters), or diacritical marks that modify beneath or above a base glyph. Some scripts, such as Arabic or Devanagari, require contextual shaping where the appearance of a glyph depends on surrounding characters.

Glyphs are distinct from the abstract characters defined by character encoding standards such as Unicode. The encoding defines code points, while the font provides the corresponding glyph shapes. Multiple fonts may provide different glyph designs for the same character, and some fonts include alternative glyphs for stylistic effects or historical variants.

Historically and linguistically, the term glyph originally referred to carved or inscribed marks. In modern typography and computing, it denotes the visual representation of a character within a font, encompassing letters, digits, symbols, ligatures, and diacritics.