If you’re new to the design world, you may still be absorbing an abundance of type-related terms. And if you’ve been in the game for a while, you know how important it is to stay current with industry jargon. “Designers, clients, art directors, and foundries need to have a common language to talk about visual messages,” says Ilene Strizver, a typographic consultant, designer, and founder of The Type Studio. “Designers need to learn to be more verbal. You have to be able to talk about type, justify your choices, and educate clients so they can appreciate what you do—and why you do it.”

Allan Haley, director of Words and Letters at Monotype Imaging (and regular DG contributor), agrees. “It’s the vocabulary designers use for the business that they’re in. If you don’t have a strong grasp of this language, it becomes difficult to communicate— especially when you deal with others who work with type and fonts.”

Whether you’re wondering about the meaning of a particular term or just want to brush up on general jargon, this glossary will help fine-tune your type vocabulary. Who knows? Being able to spout off a few of the more obscure terms may even make you a winner the next time your typographic knowledge is challenged.

The following pages of typography visuals have been repurposed with permission from Typography Workbook by Timothy Samara, published by Rockport Publishers. Highly recommended.

Character anatomy
At first glance a letterform may look simple, but there’s more to each stroke than meets the eye.

“It’s important to be familiar with characteristics of a typeface because being aware of details and conversing [with other professionals] go hand in hand,” Strizver notes.

Apex – point at the top of a character where two strokes meet (e.g., the top of the A)

Arm – horizontal stroke that does not connect to a stroke or stem on one or both ends (e.g.,T, E, F)

Ascender – portion of a lowercase character extending above the height of a lowercase x (e.g., b, d, f, h, k, l)

Bar – horizontal stroke in e, f, t, A, H, and T

Baseline – imaginary line upon which all characters sit

Bowl – the fully closed, rounded part of a character (e.g., d, q, P, R); also called Loop

Counter – open space in a fully or partly closed portion of a letter (e.g., q, Q, d, D)

Cross stroke – horizontal stroke that intersects the stem of a lowercase t or f

Crossbar – horizontal stroke that connects two strokes in capital letters such as A or H

Crotch – acute angle where two strokes meet (e.g., V, A, W); see also Vertex

Descender – portion of a letter that falls below the baseline (e.g., g, j, p, q, y)

Ear – small stroke extending from the upper-right side of the bowl of lowercase g; also appears in the angled or curved lowercase r

Hairline – the thinnest stroke in a typeface that demonstrates varying stroke widths

Leg – short, descending portion of a letter (e.g., y, R)

Ligature – two or more letters combined to form one character (fi, fl)

Mean line – imaginary line running along the top of non-ascending, lowercase letters; see also X-height

Sans serif – category of type that does not incorporate serifs

Serif – line that crosses the end of a main character stroke

Shoulder – curved stroke aiming downward from a stem (h, m, n)

Spine – main stroke in the letter s

Spur – small stroke at the base of a stem (occurs in some designs of G)

Stem – vertical, full-length stroke in upright characters like T or L; also called Main stroke

Stroke – main portion of a character

Swash – ornamental additions to some letters

Tail – short, downward stroke in K, Q, and R

Terminal – the end of a stroke that does not include a serif

Vertex – the point at the bottom or top of a character where two strokes meet (V, A, W); see also Crotch

X-height – height which lowercase letters reach based on height of lowercase x; does not include ascenders or descenders

Symbols
Type designer Jill Bell gives a nod to technology for familiarizing the general public with symbols. “Digital fonts have helped people learn what pound signs and asterisks are,” she says. “E-mail has also changed a lot of things, like the at symbol (@) and the greater than or less than signs (> <) that you’ll find in addresses.” And for designers, the ability to talk in detail about other commonly used symbols can help establish credibility in both coworkers’ and clients’ eyes.

Ampersand – a stylized character of the Latin et used to represent the word and (&)

Asterisk – star-like symbol indicating a footnote or other additional information (*)

Braces – symbols used to enclose words meant to be grouped together {}

Brackets – symbols used to enclose groups of related words, often within parentheses []

Dingbats – utility characters that include icons, symbols, fleurons, and ornaments

Diphthong – a single glyph that represents two vowels (oe)

Em dash – a solid, wide dash used to indicate a break in thought (—)

En dash – relative measurement equal to onehalf of an em; often used to represent a range between two items (e.g., 1995–2005, pages 3–30)

Leader – series of repeated characters (usually dots) used to connect type on opposite column margins or pages (e.g., tables of contents, menus, etc)

Prime – symbol denoting inches (12") and feet (1')

Smart – quotes quotation marks that curve or angle inward (“Hi.”); also called Curly quotes

Underscore – line appearing on the baseline beneath a word or phrase notating italic type (e.g., “Dynamic Graphics magazine”); now more commonly used in e-mail addresses

Virgule – alternate term for the slash symbol (/)

General terms
It’s not uncommon for some of the following terms to come up regularly in conversations with clients, coworkers, or typesetters. “I talk about basic parts of type all the time with both laymen and art directors,” Bell explains. “We might discuss whether to adjust letter spacing, word spacing, or line spacing.”

James Montalbano, founder of Terminal Design, notes that he converses regularly with traffic engineers and sign manufacturers when he creates type for highway and interstate signage. “I talk to clients about type on a daily basis,” he says, adding that educating clients is a large part of his job. While it’s not necessary for the client to be familiar with technical terms, “the more information the designer has, the more intelligent he sounds—and the more he can communicate.”

Alternate font – complements a text font; includes alternate characters such as fractions, small capitals, old-style numbers, etc.; also called an Expert-set font

Anti-aliasing – smoothing out images (in this context, glyphs) by shading pixels at the character edges

Baseline shift – typesetting control; allows characters to be raised or lowered according to the baseline

Bitmap – an image composed of pixels with a fixed resolution

Cap height – the height of capital letters in a specific typeface

Display type – large type (14 pt. and up) often used for titles, headings, subheads, etc.

Drop cap – an oversized, first letter in a paragraph (or article) whose baseline hangs below the normal baseline

Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) – PostScript language file format containing vector and sometimes bitmap info with encapsulated bitmap preview

Font – a member of a specific typeface family

Glyph – any special character, punctuation, or symbol in a font

Gutter – vertical band of white space separating two or more columns of text

Kerning – the addition or subtraction of space between two characters

Leading – distance from the baseline of one line of type to the baseline of the line of type before it; space inserted between two lines of type

Letterpress printing – relief printing process where raised inked surfaces are pressed against paper to transfer images; this process is reversed, or “wrong-reading”

Logotype – two or more characters combined to form a single unit (e.g., ellipsis: …)

Offset printing – printing process where plates are inked and an image is offset on a roller before transferring the ink to the paper; the text is “right-reading,” meaning the image of the page appears as printed, not reverse

OpenType – new cross-platform font format developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft that accommodates TrueType or PostScript Type 1 data; OpenType supports widely expanded character sets and layout features, and allows for a greater number of characters (about 65,000) to be included in a single font

Pixel – a single rectangular point in a larger graphic image that is composed of many rectangular points

PostScript – language used by many image setters to create printed versions of electronically composed pages; all marks are treated as graphics

Rasterize – process of converting a vector image to a bitmap (a raster-based or pixelbased image)

Tracking – addition or subtraction of space between characters in a block (usually a line) of text

TrueType – digital font file format (developed by Apple) designed to work with most PostScript interpreters; contains outlines that Windows and Mac operating systems automatically use to rasterize images for onscreen viewing

Typeface – a collection or family of characters, numbers, and symbols that share common design elements

Weight – measurement of the thickness of a stroke (e.g., extra light, light, medium, heavy)

Vector – resolution-independent graphics defined by mathematical statements; vector images are assigned individual properties such as color, fill, and outline