abbreviation
adscript
allograph
ascender and descender
ascent and descent
baseline
character
compendium
See #abbreviation
contraction
See #abbreviation
cue height
See x height
descender
diacritic
digraph
glyph
grapheme
A basic unit in the writing system of a (written) language. Like ‘character’, a ‘grapheme’ is an abstract term, but unlike ‘character’, it relates to the representation of phonemes. For instance, aoi represents one grapheme in modern Irish, but is composed of three different characters. Similarly, a character may be used for more than one grapheme.
letter
conceptually distinct from characters, graphemes and glyphs. A, a, a and a represent four different characters of the same letter.
ligature
majuscule
minim
minuscule and majuscule
A miniscule is a small alphabetic character; the majority of the text of a manuscript is made up of miniscule letters. A majuscule is a large alphabetic character, often used at the beginning of a sentence in Irish manuscripts.
nomina sacra
Latin for ‘sacred names’.
subscript
superscript and subscript
suspension stroke
Tironian notes
Unicode
x height
Malcolm B. Parkes and Peter A. Stokes use the term ‘cue-height’ as the palaeographical equivalent.
