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A 'trigraph' (from the Greek words ''treis'' = three and ''graphein'' = write) is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters combined. For example, in the word schilling, the trigraph "sch" represents the voiceless post-alveolar fricative (IPA: /ʃ/). In the word "night", "igh" represents the vowel (IPA: ) (a diphthong). Other examples are "beautiful" (eau), "adieu" (ieu).
Languages other than English also use trigraphs. Some languages use trigraphs to represent their native triphthongs when using plain Latin alphabet without diacritics.
An example of a trigraph is the Hungarian letter ''dzs''. Even though composed of three characters, it is only one letter. It is prononounced like an English "j" /dʒ/. The only trigraph in German is "sch", which is equivalent to the English "sh".
For more explanations on trigraphs, see the digraph article.
Longer "multigraphs" are also known. It is quite possible that the longest one is an "octagraph" 'schtschj' used in German language to represent a Russian language palatalized phoneme щь (which is represented by a digraph in Russian). According to the Peterburg phonetics school, this is not a regular phoneme of the Russian language, so the record may as well be attributed to the "heptagraph" 'schtsch' for the phoneme щ as in the German spelling of the Slavic word borshch/borscht (Ukrainian/Russian spelling: борщ ''borshch'', German spelling: Borschtsch).^[1]

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See also

References

1. Wikipedia in Russian

See also

★ Digraph (orthography)

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