Art & MusicGreek → English
Glyph
/ɡlɪf/noun
A single carved or drawn character or symbol, especially one in a writing system or a typeface.
The Greek roots
γλυφή
glyphḗ
carving, groove
Literally: “a carving”
Follow a root:γλυφή2 words
The story of the word
Architecture had the word first. The triglyph on a Doric frieze is a block cut with three grooves, and glyph entered English in the eighteenth century as the name for such a channel. Typographers then took it for the individual shape a font draws, which is why a letter and a glyph are not the same thing: one f, one i and one fi ligature are three glyphs for two letters.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
Same family
hieroglyphpetroglyphtriglyphglyptic
In a sentence
The font ships with over nine hundred glyphs, including four kinds of ampersand.
Each glyph on the stela was cut a finger deep.