RELATED: What Are Character Encodings Like ANSI and Unicode, and How Do They Differ? Behind the scenes, your computer represents these glyphs using a code that is interpreted by a program-like a web browser or a word processor-and then renders them on screen as a character. So every letter in this article is a glyph that represents a letter-a, b, c, and so on. The less-comprehensive explanation is that a character is a glyph that appears on screen when you type something. If you’re not sure what “character encoding” is, we’ve got a comprehensive explanation for you.