STOP reading for a moment and instead take a closer look at the letters that make up each of the words in this sentence. What shapes do the different letters in the alphabet have in common? What makes each letter unique?
at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany are trying to answer these questions. They are interested in analysing writing and graphical communication systems from around the world (see picture). You can help them by taking part in the .
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In the Glyph online game, you will be presented with a set of characters – such as the letters in this clause – and asked to select as many characters as possible based on simple rules you create yourself. For instance, I could select “h”, “i”, “l”, “n”, “r”, “t” and “u” from the clause in the previous sentence, because those letters all have vertical lines in them.
The Glyph research team is using the data generated by volunteers to identify the building blocks of letters from more than 40 different writing systems. The more rules you create as you play, the more points you gain and the more scripts you will unlock to analyse. You will get bonus points for creating unique rules.
The researchers hope that the data from players will help them to understand the relationships between letters within writing systems in terms of how people perceive them, as well as how those letters are pronounced in spoken language.
“Writing for us is a lens through which we can look at the bigger question of how sound and form is linked in a meaningful way,” says Kim. For instance, it will be possible to explore whether letters that sound similar when spoken are also perceived by people as having similar shapes or features in their written form, she says.
Preliminary results from the Glyph project suggest that people often converge on similar sets of rules for classifying letters. “You might describe it as left to right symmetry, or I might describe it as vertical or horizontal lines – but, conceptually, you and I have kind of identified the same thing,” says Kim.
Spotting these sorts of shared patterns in how people perceive letters could aid the development of more effective methods for teaching people how to read and write, she says.
Learning how people combine letters to form words is also of interest to linguists. “Word games like Wordle are becoming very popular, for example, and a lot of researchers are after that data, because that probably contains tonnes of insights,” says Kim.
As with Wordle, I found Glyph to be an excellent workout for my brain. Visit the the research.
What you need
Access to the Glyph website at
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