Letters are the visual marks that stand for spoken sounds in an alphabetic script.
Linguists zoom out and call the basic units of any script graphemes. It’s close to the typographic idea of a character, and letters are just one type under that umbrella.
In everyday speech letter stretches further. We call the symbols of the English alphabet letters, and we do the same for the marks of the Cherokee syllabary, even though it isn’t an alphabet.
Logograms are different. These are the meaning-based graphemes of scripts like Chinese, and they’re usually called characters. In typography, that’s the word that covers everything: phonetic symbols, syllables, abstract signs, and logograms alike.
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