The words "monosyllabic" and "disyllabic" seem to describe words with one or two sounds. I'm looking for a similar word, but that instead describes a word constructed from only one or two letters (e.g. "I" or "it").
- What words means "made of one letter" or "made of two letters"?
- Of these words, which English word is best or most often used used to describe one-or two-character words from an ideographic language?
Best Answer
As noted in previous comments, uniliteral ("consisting of a single letter") and biliteral ("composed of two letters") appear in various dictionaries and as noted refer to single-letter and two-letter constructions. However, the etymology of literal (as at etymonline) somewhat restricts the scope of literal, making it less applicable to ideograms:
The meaning of previously-suggested monoglyphic is "having only one siphonoglyph, the sulcus, as certain polyps: contrasted with diglyphic", where a siphonoglyph is a "ciliated groove at one or both ends of the mouth of sea anemones and some corals"; that is, the word does not treat of single-character words. Grapheme, also mentioned before, has forms monographemic, bigraphemic, and digraphemic that are used apparently for speaking of one- or two-character Chinese/Japanese/Korean words. For example, Sproat et al, 1996 say:
The terms monographemic, bigraphemic, and digraphemic serve for alphabetic single-letter and two-letter words as well. Per wikipedia: