From WordNet (r) 2.0 (August 2003) [wn]:
glyph
n : glyptic art in the form of a symbolic figure carved or
incised in relief
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Glyph \Glyph\ (gl[i^]f), n. [Gr. glyfh` carving, fr. gly`fein to
carve: cf. F. glyphe. Cf. Cleave to split.]
1. (Arch.) A sunken channel or groove, usually vertical. See
Triglyph.
[1913 Webster]
2. (Arch[ae]ol.) A carved figure or character, incised or in
relief; a carved pictograph; hence, a pictograph
representing a form originally adopted for sculpture,
whether carved or painted.
[Webster 1913 Suppl.]
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 Sep 2003) [foldoc]:
glyph
<character> An image used in the visual representation of
characters; roughly speaking, how a character looks. A
font is a set of glyphs.
In the simple case, for a given font (typeface and size),
each character corresponds to a single glyph but this is not
always the case, especially in a language with a large
alphabet where one character may correspond to several glyphs
or several characters to one glyph (a character encoding).
Usually used in reference to outline fonts, in particular
TrueType.
(1998-05-31)