Trigraph (orthography)
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A trigraph (from the Greek words treis = three and graphein = write) is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters combined. For example, in the word schilling, "sch" represents the 'sh' sound. In the word "night", "igh" represents the vowel (IPA: /aɪ/) (a diphthong). Other examples are "beautiful" (eau), "adieu" (ieu).
Languages other than English also use trigraphs. Some languages use trigraphs to represent their native triphthongs when using plain Latin alphabet without diacritics.
An example of a trigraph is the Hungarian letter dzs. Even though composed of three characters, it is only one letter. It makes the sound (using English pronunciation and letter romanization) jay in the alphabet, and j in a word. See Hungarian dzs for more information on this letter.
For more explanations on trigraphs, see the digraph article.
Longer "multigraphs" are also known. It is quite possible that the longest one is an "octagraph" schtschj used in German language to represent a Russian language palatalized phoneme щь (which is represented by a digraph in Russian). According to the Peterburg phonetics school this is not a regular phoneme of the Russian language, so the record may as well be attributed to the "heptagraph" schtsch for the phoneme щ [1].
The only trigraph in German is "sch" being equivalent to the English "sh"
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