A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes. Phonemic orthographies have the highest possible level of orthographic depth, as they have exact grapheme to phoneme correspondence.
For a systemic analysis of the phoneme/grapheme correspondence, Petr Sgall distinguishes two conditions, both of which are to be satisfied for a phonemic orthography:
In the past, the term phonetic orthography was used to refer to various proposals of phonetic English-language spelling reforms, e.g., by J.I.D. Hinds or Tobias Witmer.
On the other hand, Morris Swadesh defined "phonetic orthography" or "phonetic alphabet" as a writing system to make a phonetic record using symbols for "selected characteristic points in the total range of possible speech sounds", this is more commonly referred to as "phonetic transcription".