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A multigraph (or pleograph) is a sequence of letters that behaves as a unit and is not the sum of its parts, such as English ( ) or French (). The term is infrequently used, as the number of letters is usually specified: Combinations longer than tetragraphs are unusual. The German pentagraph has largely been replaced by , remaining only in proper names such as or . Except for doubled trigraphs like German , hexagraphs are found only in Irish vowels, where the outside letters indicate whether the neighboring consonant is " broad" or " slender". However, these sequences are not predictable. The hexagraph , for example, where the and mark the consonants as broad, represents the same sound (approximately the vowel in English ''write'') as the trigraph , and with the same effect on neighboring consonants. The seven-letter German sequence , used to transliterate Ukrainian , as in for " borscht", is a sequence of a trigraph and a tetragraph rather than a heptagraph. Likewise, the Juu languages have been claimed to have a heptagraph , but this is also a sequence, of and . Beyond the Latin alphabet,
Morse code Morse code is a telecommunications method which Character encoding, encodes Written language, text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code i ...
uses hexagraphs for several punctuation marks, and the dollar sign is a heptagraph, . Longer sequences are considered ligatures, and are transcribed as such in the Latin alphabet.


See also

* Unigraph (orthography) {{ling-stub