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Allography

Allography, from the Greek for "other writing", has several meanings which all relate to how words and sounds are written down.

Allographs as authorship

An allograph may be the opposite of an autograph; that is, a person's words or name (signature) written by someone else.

Allographs in script

Allography is also the variation in how letters and other graphemes are written. The letter g, for example, has two common and many less common forms (glyphs) in different typefaces, and an enormous variety in people's handwriting. A positional example of allography is the so-called long s, a symbol which was once a widely-used non-final allograph of the lowercase letter s.

Typeface allographs
a ɑ		s ſ

The fact that handwritten allographs differ so widely from person to person, and even from day to day with the same person, means that handwriting recognition software is enormously complicated.

Chinese characters

In the Chinese script, there exist several graphemes that have more than one written representation. Often, different standards will standardize using different character variants. For instance:

Standard	Allograph
Traditional Chinese	戶
Simplified Chinese	户
Japanese kanji	戸

Sometimes, variants exist within the same standard. For instance, within the Traditional Chinese standard, both 裡 and 裏 are allographs of the same word.

Allographs in orthography

An allograph may also be a smaller fragment of writing, that is a letter or a group of letters, which represents a particular sound. In the words cat and king, the letters c and k are both allographs of the same sound. This relationship between a letter and a sound is not necessarily fixed, for example in a different word, such as city, c is instead an allograph of an s sound.

Some words use groups of letters to represent a sound. In kick both k and ck are allographs of the sound that the c in cat represents. These associations are learned as part of learning to read and write a language.

English orthographic allographs for /k/
key, cat, back, bouquet, chemistry, mecca, Pinocchio, dekko, walk, khan, lacquer, biscuit, lough, forecastle, sgraffito, qat

Complicated allographs may surprise or baffle language learners, just as those in place names can continue to confuse people who are unfamiliar with a particular location, even when they are native speakers of the language. One notorious allograph in the English language is ough, which may easily represent more than 10 different sounds, depending on which word it is used in.

Allographs have found use in humor and puns; a famous example of allographic humour is that of spelling fish ghoti.

The only reason that we accept all these varieties as representing the same sound or grapheme is that we have been taught to make these associations when learning to read. That is to say, their meaning and correspondence is assigned arbitrarily, by conventions adopted and observed by a particular language community. Many of these associations have to be unlearned if we study a second language whose writing system is based upon, or contains many elements similar to or shared by, our own alphabet or writing system. Very often, the letters one might be comfortable and familiar with are allographs of quite different sounds in the second language. For example, in written Spanish the grapheme will often represent the phoneme /b/, whereas in English this does not occur.