Glyph

The distinction matters more often than it sounds. One character can be drawn by several different glyphs — a lowercase a might have an alternate form, a figure might have a lining and an old-style version — and one glyph can stand for several characters, as a ligature does when it replaces f followed by i with a single shape.

A font’s glyph count is the number of shapes in the file, and it is the honest measure of what the font can actually set. A family claiming to support Cyrillic with 250 glyphs is claiming something the arithmetic does not allow. Every glyph count in this archive is read out of the font file itself rather than taken from its description, which is why a few of them disagree with what the foundry says.