Editing Allograph (section)

{{Short description|Distinct shapes of a written symbol}}
{{about|the term used in graphemics and typography|the practice of writing one language in the script of another|Garshunography|the meaning of the term in the law of agency|Law of agency#Allograph}}
[[File:LowercaseG.svg|thumb|{{angbr|g}} rendered with or without a looptail are allographs of each other
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{{Orthography notation}}
In [[graphemics]] and [[typography]], the term '''allograph''' is used of a [[glyph]] that is a design variant of a letter or other [[grapheme]], such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious example in Latin alphabet (and many other writing systems) is the distinction between [[Letter case|uppercase and lowercase]] letters. Allographs can vary greatly, without affecting the underlying identity of the grapheme. Even if the word "cat" is rendered as "cAt", it remains recognizable as the sequence of the three graphemes {{angbr|c}}, {{angbr|a}}, {{angbr|t}}.<ref name="Cambridge">{{cite encyclopedia |encyclopedia=The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language |entry=allograph|edition=second |publisher=Cambridge University Press |date=1997 |page=196}}</ref> 

<span class="anchor" id="script"></span>Letters and other graphemes can also have significant variations that may be missed by many readers. The letter [[g]], for example, has two common forms in different [[typeface]]s, and a wide variety in people's [[handwriting]]. A positional example of allography is the [[long s]] {{gph|{{char|ſ}}}}, a symbol which was once a widely used as a non-final allograph for the lowercase letter [[s]]. 

A grapheme variant can acquire a separate meaning in a specialized [[writing system]], such as the [[International Phonetic Alphabet]] used in [[linguistics]]. Several such variants have distinct [[code point]]s in [[Unicode]] and thus are not  allographs for some applications.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Kumar|first=Sanjeev|date=2012-10-15|title=A Comparative Study of UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 of Unicode Code Point|journal=The IUP Journal of Telecommunications|location=Rochester, NY|volume=IV|issue=2|pages=50–59|ssrn=2161812}}</ref>