Témar

The 'series' of the tengwar. In normal use, each of these contained a sequence of tyeller or grades, each giving different qualities to a basic sound.

The table below shows the progression of sounds in a typical téma, in this case the tincotéma relating to the sound 't' and its derivatives. Note that this table is a theoretical description; in actual use the values of the letters tended to vary from those shown here.

	tinco The voiceless stop 't' is the base sound of the series, named tinco after the Elvish word for 'metal', and giving its name to the entire series, the tincotéma. Each of the following characters in the series represents - at least theoretically - a variation on this basic sound.
	ando The first variant of the core sound is a voiced version, in this case turning the voiceless t sound of tinco into the voiced d sound named ando (literally meaning 'gate', but chosen here because it contains a d sound).
	thûle The next two tyeller or grades represent spirants of the base sound (the equivalent in English of adding '-h' to a consonant, so in the tincotéma where the base sound is 't', the spirant is 'th'). There are two variants, and thûle (Elvish 'spirit') represents the unvoiced form as in English 'cloth' or 'path'.
	anto The second of the two spirants is anto, representing a voiced spirant. In English this is usually represented by 'th' just as for the unvoiced version, but in fact the two sounds are distinct: this voiced spirant is the 'th' sound in words like 'father' or 'clothes'. When this sound appears in Elvish words, Tolkien conventionally represents it with 'dh' in names like Caradhras or Calenardhon.