What Is Glyph?
A glyph is a single visual representation of a character — the actual drawn shape of a letter, number, punctuation mark, or symbol in a font. One character can have several glyphs (for example, a standard "a" and a swash "a"), and a font's glyph count measures how complete it is.
The distinction matters in OpenType: a character is an abstract unit (the letter "a"), while a glyph is a specific drawing of it. Alternates, ligatures, and small caps are all extra glyphs mapped to the same underlying characters.
Fonts with high glyph counts often include accented letters for many languages, multiple figure styles, and decorative alternates — useful for both multilingual work and expressive lettering.