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

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

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.

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; the most famous example of allographic humour is probably that of spelling fish ghoti.

Allography is not only the study of which letters make which sounds, but how these letters can themselves be written. Examining the letter g, for example, in different typefaces and written in different people's handwriting will provide an extraordinary range of shapes which are all instantly recognisable to us as representing one sound.

The only reason that we accept all these "squiggles" as representing the same sound is that we have been taught to make these associations when learning to read. Many of these associations have to be unlearned if we study a second language which uses the same alphabet. Suddenly the letters that we are comfortable and familiar with are allographs of quite different sounds.

The fact that allography differs so widely from person to person, and is not even consistent in one person from day to day, means that programming software which converts handwriting into text or sounds is enormously complicated.

See also

• English words with uncommon properties which includes an examination of ough
• phonics
• Allograph (handwriting)

External links

• Blog entry on the associations the shapes of letters may hold

• Forgotten Phonics rules from the early 1800s. Organized in printable sections to use as "cheat sheets" when figuring out how to pronounce words. Includes individual letter rules, dipthongs, tripthongs, silent letter rules and substitute letter rules.