- Writing system: A writing system is a set of symbols used to represent speech. It is a method of visually representing language.
- Logographic writing systems: Logographic systems use characters to represent whole words or morphemes (a meaningful unit of language smaller than a word, such as a prefix or suffix). Examples include Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
- Syllabaries: Syllabic systems use characters that represent syllables. Each character typically represents a consonant-vowel pair or a consonant-vowel-consonant combination. Examples include Japanese kana and the Linear B script used in ancient Greece.
- Alphabetic writing systems: Alphabetic systems use characters that represent individual sounds or phonemes. Each letter or character in an alphabet usually corresponds to a specific sound in spoken language. Examples include the Latin alphabet, Arabic alphabet, and Cyrillic alphabet.
- Abugida: An abugida is a type of writing system in which each consonant has an inherent vowel sound, and vowel modifications are indicated by diacritics. An abugida is similar to an alphabet, but the consonant characters include an implicit vowel sound. Examples include the Devanagari script used for Hindi and Sanskrit and the Ethiopic script used for Amharic.
- Alphabet: An alphabet is a set of letters that represent individual speech sounds, where each letter typically corresponds to one phoneme. Alphabets can be further classified as consonantal alphabets (only representing consonants), abjads (only representing consonants, with vowel sounds implied), or full alphabets (representing both vowels and consonants).
- Orthography: Orthography refers to the rules and conventions that govern the spelling of words in a writing system. It includes aspects such as letter combinations, capitalization, punctuation, and hyphenation.
- Ideographic writing systems: Ideographic writing systems use characters to represent ideas or concepts directly rather than representing sounds. Each character represents a word or an idea. One of the most well-known ideographic writing systems is Chinese characters.