Editing Orthography (section)

== Units and notation ==
{{Orthography notation}}
Orthographic units, such as letters of an [[alphabet]], are conceptualized as [[grapheme]]s. These are a type of [[abstraction]], analogous to the [[phoneme]]s of spoken languages; different physical forms of written symbols are considered to represent the same grapheme if the differences between them are not significant for meaning. Thus, a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of [[glyph]]s that are all functionally equivalent. For example, in written English (or other languages using the [[Latin alphabet]]), there are two different physical representations (glyphs) of the [[lowercase]] Latin letter ''[[a]]'': {{gpm|a}} and {{gpm|ɑ}}. Since the substitution of either of them for the other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be [[allograph]]s of the same grapheme, which can be written {{gph|a}}. The [[Italic type|italic]] and [[Font#Weight|boldface]] forms are also allographic.

Graphemes or sequences of them are sometimes placed between angle brackets, as in {{gph|b}} or {{gph|back}}. This distinguishes them from phonemic transcription, which is placed between slashes ({{IPA|/b/}}, {{IPA|/bæk/}}), and from [[phonetic transcription]], which is placed between square brackets ({{IPA|[b]}}, {{IPA|[bæk]}}).