Serif

In typography, a serif () 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), like so, and a typeface that does not include them is sans-serif. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" (in German, grotesk) or "Gothic" (although this often refers to blackletter type as well). In German usage, the term Antiqua is used more broadly for serif types.

Serif typefaces can be broadly classified into one of four subgroups: Old-style, Transitional, Didone, and Slab serif, in order of first emergence.

Origins and etymology

Serifs originated from the first official Greek writings on stone and in 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 chiselled into stone.

The origin of the word 'serif' is obscure, but apparently is almost as recent as the type style. The book 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, with Letters of Exemplification, Elementary and Compleat: Together with an Useful and Practical Appendix by William Hollins (1813), 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".