merkkityypit

Merkkityypit, or character types, refer to the various categories of symbols that can be represented in written language and digital text. In linguistic terminology they are divided primarily into alphabetic, numeric, punctuation and other symbol groups. Alphabetic characters include letters of alphabets such as Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and they form the basis of words. Within alphabets, letters are further grouped by case: uppercase, lowercase, and sometimes titlecase. Numeric characters cover digits 0–9 and are used for counting and arithmetic notation. Punctuation marks comprise symbols that structure sentences, such as periods, commas, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation points, and they convey meaning about pauses, intonation, and sentence boundaries.

Other symbol groups include mathematical operators and signs (±, ∑, ∆), currency signs (€, $, £), miscellaneous symbols (©, ™), and emojis, which are pictorial characters that convey emotion or ideas. In computer systems, these groups are encoded in standards like ASCII and the significantly larger Unicode standard. Unicode assigns each character a unique code point and categorizes it using General Category properties such as Lu (Letter, uppercase), Ll (Letter, lowercase), Nd (Number, decimal digit), Po (Punctuation, other), So (Symbol, other), and so forth.

Combining characters are a special type of symbol that modifies preceding characters, such as diacritical marks like accents or cedillas. They are not normally displayed as standalone glyphs but alter the stylization of the base letter. This multi‑tiered classification allows software to correctly render, sort, and analyze textual content across languages and scripts.