glyph

n. small decorative sculpture of a figure, carving; heiroglyph, picture used to represent a word or idea; symbol that conveys an idea nonverbally

In typography, a glyph is the shape given in a particular typeface to a specific grapheme or symbol. 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.
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(n.)
A sunken channel or groove, usually vertical. See Triglyph.
  

<character> An image used in the visual representation of characters; roughly speaking, how a character looks. A font is a set of glyphs.
In the simple case, for a given font (typeface and size), each character corresponds to a single glyph but this is not always the case, especially in a language with a large alphabet where one character may correspond to several glyphs or several characters to one glyph (a character encoding).
Usually used in reference to outline fonts, in particular TrueType.
(1998-05-31)

Noun
1. glyptic art in the form of a symbolic figure carved or incised in relief
(hypernym) glyptic art, glyptography