Simple numerical versions of the Spatial Coding and of the Open Bigrams coding of character strings are presented, together with a natural merging of these two approaches. Comparing the predictive performance of these three orthographic coding schemes on orthographic masked priming data, we observe that the merged coding scheme always provides the best fits. Testing the ability of the orthographic codes, used as regressors, to capture relevant regularities in lexical decision data, we also observe that the merged code provides the best fits and that both the spatial coding component and the open bigrams component provide specific and significant contributions. This gives us a new lighting on probable mechanisms involved in orthographic coding, together with new tools for modelling behavioural and electrophysiological data collected in word recognition tasks.