Hungarian orthography (Hungarian: helyesírás, lit. ‘correct writing’) consists of rules defining the standard written form of the Hungarian language. It includes the spelling of lexical words, proper nouns and foreign words (loanwords) in themselves, with suffixes, and in compounds, as well as the hyphenation of words, punctuation, abbreviations, collation (alphabetical ordering), and other information (such as how to write dates).
Hungarian is written with the Hungarian alphabet, an extended version of the Latin alphabet. Its letters usually indicate sounds, except when morphemes are to be marked (see below). The extensions include consonants written with digraphs or a trigraph and vowel letters marked with diacritics. Long consonants are marked by a double letter (e.g. l > ll and sz > ssz) while long vowels get an acute accent (e.g. o > ó) or their umlaut is replaced with a double acute accent (ö, ü > ő, ű). Only the first letter of digraphs and of the trigraph dzs is written in upper case when capitalizing in normal text, but all letters are capitalized in acronyms and all-uppercase inscriptions.
The letters q, x, y, w are only part of the extended Hungarian alphabet and they are rarely used in Hungarian words – they are normally replaced with their usual phonetic equivalents kv, ksz, i, v (only the x is relatively common, e.g. taxi). Ch is not a part of the alphabet but it still exists in some words (like technika, 'technology' or 'technique'). In traditional surnames, other digraphs may occur as well, both for vowels and consonants.