orthography: the way in which the sounds of a language are written, usually referring to a practical system for everyday use. In an ideal orthography, each phoneme is represented by only one grapheme (letter of the alphabet), and each grapheme represents only one phoneme. However, orthographies (and notoriously the English orthography) often fail to do this. For example, the phoneme /ʊ/ may be represented as "u" (as in "push"), as "oo" (as in "cook"), or "ou" (as in "could"). At the same time, "u" often represents /ə/ (as in "bus") or /iu/ (as in "cute"), "oo" may represent /u/ (as in "kook" or "goo"), and "ou" may represent /au/ (as in "out"). [Spanish: ortografía]
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