What does the term allograph refer to?

The term allograph refers to a variation or alternate symbol for the same sound. In phonetics and linguistics, an allograph is one of the different letters or combinations of letters that represent the same phoneme in a language. For instance, the phoneme /f/ can be represented by various allographs such as 'f', 'ph', or 'gh' in different words (e.g., 'fish', 'phone', 'tough'). This concept is essential for understanding how different orthographic representations can correspond to the same sound in spoken language, highlighting the complexity of the relationship between sounds and their written forms.

The other options relate to different linguistic concepts but do not accurately define an allograph. The study of spelling pertains more broadly to orthography; the smallest unit of language with meaning refers to a morpheme; and a collection of letters with meaning describes a word or term but not a specific variation of a symbol for a sound. Each of these concepts plays a role in language, but they do not capture the essence of what an allograph stands for.