Glyph

[glif] /glɪf/

noun
1.
a pictograph or hieroglyph.
2.
a sculptured figure or relief carving.
3.
Architecture. an ornamental channel or groove.
/ɡlɪf/
noun
1.
a carved channel or groove, esp a vertical one as used on a Doric frieze
2.
(rare) another word for hieroglyphic
3.
any computer-generated character regarded in terms of its shape and bit pattern
n.

1727, “ornamental groove in architecture,” from French glyphe (1701), from Greek glyphe “a carving,” from glyphein “to hollow out, cut out with a knife, engrave, carve,” from PIE root *gleubh- “to cut, slice” (cf. Latin glubere “to peel, shell, strip,” Old English cleofan “to cleave”). Meaning “sculpted mark or symbol” (as in hieroglyph) is from 1825.
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)