11 Vocabulary Words for Typography Nerds

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If you love design and you love words, chances are you get excited about a well-designed font. Here are a handful of terms to get you started as a font nerd.

1. Glyph

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A glyph is a written symbol that carries meaning. For example, letters are glyphs.

2. Kerning

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Kerning is the careful calibration of space between pairs of letters to create a balanced and visually pleasing effect.

3. Sans serif

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Serifs are the little lines at the ends of the strokes in some letters. Sans means “without,” so a sans serif font has no serifs.

4. Bowl

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The bowl is the curved part of a letter that encloses an open space, as in the letters o, p, d, b and q.

5. Swash

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A swash is an embellishment or flourish on a glyph.

6. Halbfett

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This German word is commonly used for the bold weight in a type family.

7. Point

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The point is a unit of measurement used to define font size. In the digital age, there are 72 points per inch.

8. Ascenders

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These are the tall parts of letters such as lowercase d, l and f, which ascend above the typical height of a lowercase x.

9. Descenders

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Similar to ascenders, except they drop below the baseline, or the bottom of a line of lowercase text. Lowercase j, p, g and q have descenders.

10. Diacritics

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Diacritics are extra marks added to a letter that changes the sound of the letter, or add an additional sound or meaning to the word. Examples include accent marks, tildes, and umlauts.

11. Handgloves

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Many font designers use the word “handgloves” to show off their work because the combination of letters represents most of the strokes and shapes found in the font.

Sources: Font Shop Typographer’s Glossary and Wikipedia.org.