The term for the abstract entity represented by a glyph is character: a typographical character may be a grapheme (an element of a writing system), but also a numeral, a punctuation mark, or a pictorial or decorative symbol (such as dingbats, or Unicode's "Miscellaneous Symbols").

Two or more glyphs representing the same grapheme, either interchangeably or context-dependent, are called allographs.