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A phonemic orthography is a writing system where there is a one-to-one relationship between graphemes in the written form and phonemes in the spoken form of a language. These are sometimes termed true alphabets, but they needn't be alphabetic, a syllabary could do just as well.
Commonly claimed examples include the writing systems for Georgian and Esperanto. Basque and Finnish are also good examples of languages with a good grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence.
One example of a phonemic orthography is the International Phonetic Alphabet, intended to accurately describe the pronunciation of a language. Other phonetic alphabets may be used for languages which have no standard written form; these orthographies are also phonemic.
As dialects of the English language vary significantly, it would be difficult to create a phonemic orthography that encompassed all of them. However, it is fairly easy to create one based on a standard dialect such as Received Pronunciation. This would, however, exclude certain sound differences found in other dialects, such as the bad-lad split in Australian English. With time, pronunciations change and thus in order to maintain a phonemic orthography such a system would need periodic updating in order to not become out of date, as has happened to English and French.
Note that phonemic orthographies are different from phonetic orthographies; whereas in a phonemic orthography, allophones will be represented by the same grapheme, a phonetic orthography demands, by its very nature, that the phonetically distinct allophones be written as such. To use an example from English, the "t" sound in the words "table" and "cat" would, in a phonemic orthography, be written with the same character; however, a phonetic orthography would make a distinction between the aspirated "t" in "table", the flap in "butter", the unaspirated "t" in "stop" and the glottalized "t" in "cat."
In other words:
A phonemic orthography represents phonemes, the sounds distinguished by speakers of the language and used to differentiate words (e.g. "fat" vs "vat").
A phonetic orthography represents phones, the sounds humans are capable of producing, many of which will often be grouped together as a single phoneme in any given natural language, the groupings being varied across languages. English, for example, does not distinguish aspirated/unaspirated consonants, but other languages, like Bengali and Hindi, do.
See also
"Phonemic orthography"