allograph of an s sound. Some words use groups of letters to represent a sound. In kick both k and ck are allographs of the sound that the c in cat represents. These associations are learned as part of learning to read and write a language. However, the development of phonetic associations is more difficult when deaf children are learning written languages. For example, without auditory knowledge of words, children are unable to associate graphemes with phonemes, or the sounds of letters or groups of letters. This lack of alphabetic knowledge correlates with delayed literacy in early learning. Allographs have found use in humor and puns; a famous example of allographic humour is that of spelling fish as ghoti. The primary reason that we accept all these varieties as representing the same sound or grapheme is that we have been taught to make these associations when learning to read the English language. That is to say, their meaning and correspondence is assigned arbitrarily, by conventions adopted and observed by a particular language community. Many of these associations have to be unlearned if we study a second language whose writing system is based upon, or contains many elements similar to or shared by, our own alphabet or writing system. Very often, the letters one might be comfortable and familiar with are allographs of quite different sounds in the second language. For example, in written Spanish the grapheme ⟨v⟩ will often represent the phoneme /b/, whereas in English this does not occur. Typography The term 'allograph' is used to describe the different representations of the same grapheme or character in different typefaces. The resulting font elements may look quite different in shape and style from the reference character or each other, but nevertheless their meaning remains the same. In Unicode, a given character is allocated a code point: all allographs of that character have the same code point and thus the essential meaning is retained irrespective of font choice at time of printing or display. See also References Orthography Writing systems Penmanship Typography