A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes.^[1] Phonemic orthographies have the highest possible level of orthographic depth, as they have exact grapheme to phoneme correspondence.

For a systemic analysis of the phoneme/grapheme correspondence, Petr Sgall distinguishes two conditions, both of which are to be satisfied for a phonemic orthography:^[2]

• in any context, a given grapheme is pronounced as the same phoneme ("uniqueness of pronunciation")
• in any context, a given phoneme is written with the same grapheme ("uniqueness of spelling")

In the past, the term phonetic orthography was used to refer to various proposals of phonetic English-language spelling reforms,^[3] e.g., by J.I.D. Hinds^[4][5] or Tobias Witmer.^[6]

On the other hand, Morris Swadesh defined "phonetic orthography" or "phonetic alphabet" as a writing system to make a phonetic record using symbols for "selected characteristic points in the total range of possible speech sounds",^[1]: 365 this is more commonly referred to as "phonetic transcription".

• Alphabetic principle
• Defective script
• Phonetic transcription
• Spelling
• Morphophonology
• Orthographic depth
• Orthographic transcription