Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English and Irish, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of words can largely be predicted from the spelling. The punctuation is similar to that used in other Romance languages and in English.
The Spanish language is written using the Spanish alphabet, which is the Latin script with one additional letter: eñe "ñ", for a total of 27 letters. Although the letters "k" and "w" are part of the alphabet, they appear only in loanwords such as , , and (tungsten). Each letter has a single official name according to the Real Academia Española's new 2010 Common Orthography, but in some regions alternative traditional names coexist as explained below. The digraphs "ch" and "ll" were considered letters of the alphabet from 1754 to 2010 (and sorted separately from "c" and "l" from 1803 to 1994). The digraph "rr" is occasionally considered a letter, but officially it was never so.
^1 The sequence ⟨ch⟩ represents the affricate /tʃ/. The digraph was formerly treated as a single letter, called che.
^2 The phonemes /θ/ and /s/ have merged in many dialects; see seseo.