Typography Word of the Day: Glyph

First in an irrgular series.

The word glyph, as we use it today, seems to be understood to be a single character in a font or a typeface. A good example of this usage is the way individual characters are accessed under InDesign-we use a glyph palette to access individual bits of type that are not obviously or directably accessable from the keyboard.

The roots of the word go back to the Greek, according to this entry at the site yourDictionary.com, meaning of the root gluphein or “to carve”, rendering the meaning most appropriate, “a symbolic figure that is usually engraved or incised”. Interpreting this certainly seems to suggest use to write letters or characters.

This meaning comes forward through such words as hieroglyph (the famous Egyptian “high holy writing”) and petroglyph (aboriginal markings made on rock).

Bringhurst defines glyph as “a version of a character”, equating it with the word sort, which he defines as a “single piece of metal type: therefore, a letter in one particular style and size.” Thus, within an individual face, a z with a swash would be a different glyph than a z without a swash, though they are the same character in essence.

Therefore, when we say glyph here, we mean a single representation of a typographic character in a type face, regardless of what that typographic character would otherwise be called.