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What is a glyph?

Lesson 03 · 3 min read · Updated 30 September 2026

A glyph is a single drawn shape in a font: the particular g that one font draws for the character g. One character, many glyphs. Here is g as 24 free fonts draw it.

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Character

g · U+0067Latin small letter gOne character, 24 glyphs

01

Glyph vs character

A character is a unit of text: what you type, search for and copy. Each one has a number in Unicode, the standard every computer shares; the small g is U+0067. A character has no shape of its own. A glyph is the shape: the drawing a particular font makes for a character.

A font maps characters to glyphs, and the map is rarely one to one. DM Sans, the sans this site is set in, holds 486 glyphs for 403 characters. The extra glyphs are second drawings of the same characters, such as the a and g behind its stylistic sets, and shapes that stand for several characters at once, such as a ligature. The board’s second view shows both.

02

Font vs typeface

A typeface is a design: Garamond, Helvetica, DM Sans. A font is one concrete form of it. In metal type, a font was a set of letters in one size and style, such as 12-point Garamond italic; on a computer it is a file, such as DM Sans Bold. A family gathers a typeface’s styles, and a variable font packs a whole range of weights, and sometimes widths, into one file.

In everyday speech the two words have merged, and nobody minds. The difference still counts in two places. A licence covers font files, not a design. And one typeface can come from several makers as different fonts: EB Garamond and Cormorant Garamond are two free revivals of Garamond, with glyphs of their own throughout. Font vs typeface sets the difference out on Roboto’s 36 fonts.

03

How many glyphs a font holds

A font for English alone needs little more than a hundred glyphs: letters, figures and punctuation. Accented letters for other European languages take a Latin font to several hundred, and Greek, Cyrillic, small capitals and alternates take it into the thousands: Instrument Serif holds 377 glyphs, Inter 2,933 and EB Garamond 3,247. One font can hold at most 65,535, a limit Chinese and Japanese typefaces run up against.

04

Glyphs on FontKind

Every font page on FontKind shows the font’s letters, figures and signs in one grid, each of them a glyph of that font; tap the ones you like to find fonts by their letters. The board above works the same way across fonts. Each cell is the same character drawn from the font’s own outline at one size, so a tall x-height or a long descender shows as it is.

Glyphs are also how fonts are told apart. Two fonts can look alike in a paragraph and still draw one letter differently: a g with one storey or two, an R whose leg is straight or curved. The balance test’s detail rounds ask you to spot exactly that.

05

Try it in the game

06

Fonts to open

  • Sans serif
    Inter

    2,933 glyphs, with alternates for a, f, l, t and more

  • Sans serif
    DM Sans

    486 glyphs, a second a and g among them

  • Serif
    EB Garamond

    3,247 glyphs: small capitals, swashes and old ligatures

  • Serif
    Instrument Serif

    377 glyphs, with a second a, c, d, e and g

07

Questions

What is the difference between a glyph and a character?
A character is a unit of text, such as the letter g, with a number in Unicode. A glyph is the shape a particular font draws for it. The same character looks different in every font because each font has its own glyph for it.
What is the difference between a font and a typeface?
A typeface is the design, such as Garamond; a font is one concrete form of it, today a file such as EB Garamond Bold. In everyday use the two words mean the same thing.
How many glyphs can a font have?
Up to 65,535 in one OpenType or TrueType font. A basic Latin font has a few hundred; fonts with several alphabets, small capitals and alternates run to thousands.

08

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