26 terms · every one shown in real type
The type dictionary
Every word this site uses about typefaces, explained in plain language — and each one demonstrated with faces from the archive rather than described in the abstract.
Letterforms
- Ascender and descender
- An ascender is the part of a letter that rises above the x-height — the stem of a b or an h — and a descender is the part that drops below the baseline, as in p or y.
- Counter
- A counter is the enclosed or partly enclosed space inside a letter — the hole in an o, the gap in an e, the bowl of an a.
- Display and text faces
- A display face is drawn to be set large, a text face to be read in quantity at small sizes — and using either one for the other’s job is the most common typographic mistake there is.
- Italic and oblique
- A true italic is a separate set of letters drawn from handwriting; an oblique is the upright face mechanically slanted. They are not the same thing.
- Monospacealso Fixed-width
- In a monospace font every character takes exactly the same horizontal space, so an i is as wide as an m.
- Sans-serifalso Sans, Grotesque, Gothic
- A sans-serif is a typeface drawn without the finishing strokes at the ends of its letters — “sans” is simply French for “without”.
- Serif
- A serif is the small finishing stroke at the end of a letter’s stem, and a serif typeface is one that has them.
- Slab serifalso Egyptian, Mechanical
- A slab serif is a serif typeface whose serifs are thick rectangular blocks, the same weight as the stems they finish.
- Stroke contrastalso Contrast, Modulation
- Stroke contrast is the difference between the thickest and thinnest parts of a letter — high contrast means hairlines beside heavy stems.
- X-height
- The x-height is the height of a lowercase x — the body of the letters, without the bits that stick up or hang down.
Spacing and layout
- Baseline
- The baseline is the invisible line the letters sit on — the one a lowercase o hangs slightly below and a p drops through.
- Kerning
- Kerning is the adjustment of space between one specific pair of letters, so that combinations like AV or To do not leave a visible gap.
- Leadingalso Line height, Line spacing
- Leading is the vertical distance from one baseline to the next — line-height in CSS — and it decides whether a paragraph is readable more than the typeface does.
- Measurealso Line length
- The measure is how long a line of text is, counted in characters rather than pixels — and the comfortable range for reading is roughly 45 to 75.
- Trackingalso Letter-spacing
- Tracking is the space added to or taken from every letter in a run of text at once — in CSS, letter-spacing.
Files and formats
- Glyph
- A glyph is one drawn shape inside a font file. A character is what you type; a glyph is what gets painted.
- Hinting
- Hinting is extra instructions inside a font telling a renderer how to fit the outlines onto a pixel grid at small sizes.
- Ligature
- A ligature is a single glyph that replaces two or more characters which would otherwise collide — most commonly fi and fl.
- OpenType features
- OpenType features are switches inside a font that swap one set of glyphs for another — small capitals, old-style figures, tabular numbers, alternate letters.
- Subsetting
- Subsetting is cutting a font down to only the characters a page actually needs, which can take a family from 300 KB to 30.
- Variable font
- A variable font is one file that contains a continuous range of a typeface — every weight from thin to black, and any value in between — rather than one file per style.
- Weight
- Weight is how heavy the strokes of a typeface are, numbered from 100 for thin to 900 for black, with 400 as regular and 700 as bold.
- WOFF2
- WOFF2 is the font format the web uses: the same font as a TTF or OTF, compressed for delivery, and typically about 40% smaller.
Licensing
- Commercial use
- Commercial use means using a font in work that makes money — a client project, a product, an advertisement — and it is the permission a licence most often withholds.
- Embedding
- Embedding is putting a font inside something you distribute — a website, a PDF, an app, a slide deck — rather than expecting the reader to have it installed.
- SIL Open Font Licensealso OFL
- The OFL is the licence almost every free font worth having is released under: use it for anything, including commercial work, modify it, and pass it on — as long as you do not sell the font file by itself.
Now go and look at some type.
Every term here is easier to see than to read about. All 337 families in the archive are free for commercial work, and you can set any of them in your own words.