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The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. (Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography.) Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós ("correct") and γράφειν gráphein ("to write"). Orthography is distinct from typography.

Orthography describes or defines the set of symbols (graphemes and diacritics) used, and the rules about how to write these symbols. Depending on the nature of the writing system, the rules may include punctuation, spelling and capitalization.

While "orthography" colloquially is often used synonymously with spelling, spelling is only part of orthography.

An orthography may be described as "efficient" if it has one grapheme per phoneme (distinctive speech sound) and vice versa. An orthography may also have varying degrees of efficiency for reading or writing. For example, diverse letter, digraph, and diacritic shapes contribute to diverse word shapes, which aid fluent reading, while heavy use of apostrophes or diacritics makes writing slow, and the use of symbols not found on standard keyboards makes computer or cell phone input awkward. These are all considerations in the design of a writing system.

A phonemic orthography is an orthography that has a dedicated symbol or sequence of symbols for each phoneme (distinctive speech sound) and vice versa. Most alphabetic scripts are fairly close to being phonemic, though English is a notorious exception.

A morpho-phonemic orthography considers not only what is phonemic, as above, but also the underlying structure of the words. For example, in English, /s/ and /z/ are distinct phonemes, so in a phonemic orthography the plurals of cat and dog would be cats and dogz. However, English orthography recognizes that the /s/ sound in cats and the /z/ sound in dogs are the same element (archiphoneme), automatically pronounced differently depending on its environment, and therefore writes them the same despite their differing pronunciation. German and Russian are morpho-phonemic in this sense, whereas Turkish is purely phonemic. Korean hangul has changed over the centuries from a highly phonemic to a largely morpho-phonemic orthography, and there are moves in Turkey to make that script more morpho-phonemic as well.

A "defective orthography" is one that does not represent all the sounds of a language, such as Italian, English or Arabic.

Complex orthographies often combine different types of scripts and/or utilize many different complex punctuation rules. Some widely accepted examples of languages with complex orthographies include Thai, Japanese, and Khmer.

• Writing systems:
  • Logogram
  • Syllabary
  • Alphabet
    • Abjad
    • Abugida
• Writing rules and components:
  • Collation
  • Diacritic
  • Digraph (orthography)
  • Eight Principles of Yong
  • Letter case and capitalization
    • Majuscule
    • Minuscule
  • Punctuation
  • Radical (Chinese character)
  • Silent letter
  • Spelling
  • Stroke order

• Phonemic orthography
• Prescription and description
• Romanization
• Penmanship
• Cursive
• Calligraphy
• Graphology
• Writing
• List of writing systems

• Smalley, W.A. (ed.) 1964. Orthography studies: articles on new writing systems (United Bible Society, London).

• The CODE and the Challenge of Learning to Read It
• Videos: The History and Impact of Writing in the West
• Omniglot - writing systems & languages of the world - a privately run orthography website
• Phonemic awareness page of the CTER wiki
• lonestar.texas.net/~jebbo/learn-as/ orthography of Old English