---
name: Glyph
slug: glyph
category: typography
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A single drawn shape in a font, which may be one character, a
  variant of one, or several characters fused together.
aliases:
  - name: character
  - name: letterform
tags:
  - fonts
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - typeface
    - tofu
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - tittle
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: A Glossary of Typographic Terms (Monotype)
    url: https://www.monotype.com/resources/typographic-terms
  - title: Letters (Google Fonts Knowledge)
    url: https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/letters
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: talking about drawn shapes rather than characters
---

Three words get used for the same thing and they are not the same thing. A
character is the unit of writing: the letter a, whatever it looks like. A codepoint
is the number a character is stored as, U+0061 for that a. A glyph is a shape a
typeface draws, and it exists in the font file rather than in the text. Set a
sentence in two faces and the characters are identical while every glyph has been
replaced, which is the whole reason a font swap changes the length of a line.

The mapping between the two is many to many in both directions. One character can
have several glyphs in a single face: a lining figure and an oldstyle one, a
[small cap](/small-caps) and a full capital, a swash alternate for the last letter
of a word, a contextual form that only appears after certain letters. And several
characters can share one glyph, which is what a [ligature](/ligature) is: the pair
f and i stays two characters in the string, two codepoints in the file, and one
drawing on the screen. Nothing about the text changed. The font simply had a better
answer for that sequence, and [OpenType features](/opentype-features) are the switches
that let it give one.

The distinction bites wherever software has to count. String length counts
codepoints, not shapes, so a fused fi is two and a family emoji built from several
codepoints joined together is five or six while being unmistakably one picture. The
caret has to move by shapes rather than by codepoints, or an arrow key lands
somewhere with no visible position, which is why text engines work in clusters
instead. Scripts like Devanagari and Arabic make the gap obvious rather than
occasional, since a written syllable there is routinely one glyph assembled from
several characters, and any tool that assumed one shape per character breaks the
first time it meets one.

For anyone shipping fonts, glyphs are also the unit of cost. Subsetting a web font
means keeping the glyphs a site actually needs and discarding the rest, which is
where the real weight goes, and a face advertised as having thousands of glyphs is
advertising its coverage of scripts and alternates rather than anything about its
letters. It is worth checking what a file really contains, because a feature the
font has no glyphs for cannot happen: the tag is accepted, nothing is substituted,
and the page looks exactly as it did before.