Serif

In typography, a serif (/ˈsɛrɪf/) is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or 'font family' making use of serifs is called a serif typeface (or serifed typeface), and a typeface that does not include them is a sans-serif one. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as 'grotesque' (in German, 'grotesk') or 'Gothic', and serif typefaces as 'roman'.The printing of Nicolas Jenson.De Aetna, printed by Aldus Manutius.A title page printed by Robert Estienne.A small-size font engraved by Claude Garamond.The Romain du roi, the first 'transitional' typeface.Condensed, high x-height types in the 'Dutch taste' style, c. 1720.Title page by John Baskerville, 1757.Alphabet engraved by Pierre-Simon Fournier in his Manuel typographique, 1760s.Transitional type cut by Joan Michaël Fleischman of Amsterdam, 1768.1779 theatre poster, London.Didone type in a book printed by the company of Firmin Didot, 1804Bodoni's postumously-published Manuale Tipografico, 1818.Inline modern face.'Fat face' ultra-bold Didone type.A showing of the original Clarendon typeface.Display-size slab-serif fonts.Miller and Richard's Modernised Old Style, a reimagination of pre-Didone typefaces.William Morris's Golden Type and other typefaces cut for his Kelmscott Press in the style of early printing.ATF's 'Garamond' type, an example of the revival of interest in old-style faces that accelerated from the end of the nineteenth century.Memorial plaque by Eric Gill, c. 1920s. In typography, a serif (/ˈsɛrɪf/) is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or 'font family' making use of serifs is called a serif typeface (or serifed typeface), and a typeface that does not include them is a sans-serif one. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as 'grotesque' (in German, 'grotesk') or 'Gothic', and serif typefaces as 'roman'. Serifs originated in the Latin alphabet with inscriptional lettering—words carved into stone in Roman antiquity. The explanation proposed by Father Edward Catich in his 1968 book The Origin of the Serif is now broadly but not universally accepted: the Roman letter outlines were first painted onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brush marks, which flared at stroke ends and corners, creating serifs. Another theory is that serifs were devised to neaten the ends of lines as they were chiseled into stone. The origin of the word serif is obscure, but apparently is almost as recent as the type style. In The British Standard of the Capital Letters contained in the Roman Alphabet, forming a complete code of systematic rules for a mathematical construction and accurate formation of the same (1813) by William Hollins, it defined surripses, usually pronounced 'surriphs', as 'projections which appear at the tops and bottoms of some letters, the O and Q excepted, at the beginning or end, and sometimes at each, of all'. The standard also proposed that surripsis may be a Greek word derived from συν (together) and ριψις (projection). In 1827, a Greek scholar Julian Hibbert printed with his own experimental uncial Greek types, remarking that the types of Giambattista Bodoni's Callimachus were 'ornamented (or rather disfigured) by additions of what believe type-founders call syrifs or cerefs'. The printer Thomas Curson Hansard referred to them as 'ceriphs' in 1825. The oldest citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are 1830 for serif and 1841 for sans serif. The OED speculates that serif was a back-formation from sanserif. Webster's Third New International Dictionary traces serif to the Dutch noun schreef, meaning 'line, stroke of the pen', related to the verb schrappen, 'to delete, strike through'. Schreef now also means 'serif' in Dutch. (The relation between 'schreef' and 'schrappen' is documented by Van Veen and Van der Sijs in Etymologisch Woordenboek (Van Dale, 1997). Yet, 'schreef' literally is past-tense of 'schrijven' (to write). In her Chronologisch Woordenboek (Veen, 2001), Van der Sijs lists words by first known publication in the language area that is The Netherlands today. Van der Sijs: schrijven, 1100; schreef, 1350; schrappen, 1406. I.e. 'schreef' is from 'schrijven' (to write), not from 'schrappen' (to scratch, eliminate by strike-through).) The OED's earliest citation for 'grotesque' in this sense is 1875, giving stone-letter as a synonym. It would seem to mean 'out of the ordinary' in this usage, as in art grotesque usually means 'elaborately decorated'. Other synonyms include 'Doric' and 'Gothic', commonly used for Japanese Gothic typefaces. Serif fonts can be broadly classified into one of four subgroups: old style, transitional, Didone and slab serif, in order of first appearance. Old-style typefaces date back to 1465, shortly after Johannes Gutenberg's adoption of the movable type printing press. Early printers in Italy created types that broke with Gutenberg's blackletter printing, creating upright and later italic styles inspired by Renaissance calligraphy. Old-style serif fonts have remained popular for setting body text because of their organic appearance and excellent readability on rough book paper. The increasing interest in early printing during the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a return to the designs of Renaissance printers and typefounders, many of whose names and designs are still used today. Old style type is characterized by a lack of large differences between thick and thin lines (low line contrast) and generally but less often by a diagonal stress (the thinnest parts of letters are at an angle rather than at the top and bottom). An old-style font normally has a left-inclining curve axis with weight stress at about 8 and 2 o'clock; serifs are almost always bracketed (they have curves connecting the serif to the stroke); head serifs are often angled. Old-style faces evolved over time, showing increasing abstraction from what would now be considered handwriting and blackletter characteristics, and often increased delicacy or contrast as printing technique improved. Old-style faces have often sub-divided into Venetian (or humanist) and Garalde (or Aldine), a division made on the Vox-ATypI classification system. Nonetheless, some have argued that the difference is excessively abstract, hard to spot except to specialists and implies a clearer separation between styles than originally appeared. Modern typefaces such as Arno and Trinité may fuse both styles.