And this only covers one language, English, which is in one alphabet, Latin (also known as the Roman alphabet). So far, so simple, especially if you think there are only 26 characters in the alphabet, ten numbers, and some grammatical marks like ! or there are also 26 upper case letters and far more grammatical marks that you might realize (your keyboard only shows a small subset of possible grammatical marks, even for English). RELATED: What Are Character Encodings Like ANSI and Unicode, and How Do They Differ? Behind the scenes, your computer represents these glyphs using a code that is interpreted by a program-like a web browser or a word processor-and then renders them on screen as a character. So every letter in this article is a glyph that represents a letter-a, b, c, and so on. The less-comprehensive explanation is that a character is a glyph that appears on screen when you type something. If you’re not sure what “character encoding” is, we’ve got a comprehensive explanation for you.
