trigraph

English

Etymology

From tri- +‎ -graph.

Noun

trigraph (plural trigraphs)

1. (linguistics) A specific sequence of three letters, especially one used collectively to represent a single phoneme.
   • 2023 June 12, Sarah Forst, “How to Teach Trigraphs DGE & TCH”, in The Designer Teacher‎^[1]:

     Then, practice reading fluency sentences together that contain words with trigraphs and other mastered words.

2. (computing) A three-character sequence used to enter a single conceptual character.
   • 1993, Mark Andrews, Visual C++ Object-oriented Programming, page 186:

     These new features are charizing, stringization, token concatenation, string concatenation, trigraph replacement, and predefined macros.

Related terms

• digraph
• tetragraph
• pentagraph
• hexagraph
• heptagraph
• octagraph
• monophthong
• diphthong
• triphthong
• ligature

Translations

sequence of three letters

• Czech: trigraf m
• Finnish: kolmoiskirjain, trigrafi
• French: trigramme (fr) m
• German: Trigraph (de) m
• Hungarian: trigráf
• Polish: trójznak (pl) m
• Portuguese: trígrafo m
• Romanian: trigraf n
• Russian: please add this translation if you can

See also

• ligature