trigraph

A specific sequence of three letters, especially one used collectively to represent a single phoneme.

Noun

  1. A specific sequence of three letters, especially one used collectively to represent a single phoneme.
    • The letter “i” is pronounced as /aɪ/ when followed by the trigraph “ght”, as in right /raɪt/.
    • Then, practice reading fluency sentences together that contain words with trigraphs and other mastered words. - 2023 December 6, Sarah Forst, “How to Teach Trigraphs DGE & TCH”, in The Designer Teacher:
  2. A three-character sequence used to enter a single conceptual character.
    • These new features are charizing, stringization, token concatenation, string concatenation, trigraph replacement, and predefined macros. - 1993, Mark Andrews, Visual C++ Object-oriented Programming, page 186:

Origin

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *tréyes Proto-Indo-European *tri- Proto-Italic *tri- Latin tri-der. English tri- Proto-Indo-European *gerbʰ- Proto-Hellenic *grə́pʰō Ancient Greek γράφω (gráphō) Ancient Greek -γρᾰ́φος (-grắphos)der. English -graph English trigraph From tri- + -graph.

Forms

trigraphs

Related

digraph tetragraph pentagraph hexagraph heptagraph octagraph monophthong diphthong triphthong ligature