glyph
NounWordNet 3.0
Noun (1)
- glyptic art in the form of a symbolic figure carved or incised in relief
What does it mean? Question 1 of today’s quiz
Webster's Dictionary (1913)
Origin: Gr. γλυφή carving, fr. γλύφειν to carve: cf. F. glyphe. Cf. Cleave to split.
1. Architecture A sunken channel or groove, usually vertical. See Triglyph.
2. Archæol. A carved figure or character, incised or in relief; a carved pictograph; hence, a pictograph representing a form originally adopted for sculpture, whether carved or painted.
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), from GCIDE 0.54 · with additions: 1913 supplement
Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
<character> An image used in the visual representation of characters; roughly speaking, how a character looks. A font is a set of glyphs.
In the simple case, for a given font (typeface and size), each character corresponds to a single glyph but this is not always the case, especially in a language with a large alphabet where one character may correspond to several glyphs or several characters to one glyph (a character encoding).
Usually used in reference to outline fonts, in particular TrueType.
(1998-05-31)