Anatomy Of A Letter

Doctors have special names for every bone in the human body. Font designers have special names for every part of a letter, too. Look closely at a lowercase g and you will find it has a bowl, a loop or a spine, and sometimes even an ear. Once you learn these names, you will never look at a font the same way again.

The invisible guide lines every letter sits on. The difference between serif and sans serif letters. What a counter is and which letters have one. How to name the stem, bowl, arm, and spine of common letters.

Every letter on a page sits on an invisible line called the baseline, the way you stand on a sidewalk. Lowercase letters without tall or hanging parts, like x, a, and e, only rise up to a line called the x-height. Capital letters rise higher, up to the cap height. Letters with tall parts, like b, d, and l, stretch above the x-height up to the ascender line. Letters with hanging parts, like p, g, and y, drop below the baseline down to the descender line.

Some fonts, like Times New Roman, have small decorative strokes at the ends of the letters called serifs, which look like little feet. These came from ancient Rome, where letters were carved into stone and the chisel left small flared marks at the end of each stroke. Other fonts, like Helvetica or Arial, have no serifs at all, which is why they are called sans serif, using the French word sans, meaning without.

The straight vertical stroke in letters like l and h is called the stem. The curved stroke that wraps around and encloses a counter, like in b and d, is called the bowl. A horizontal or upward stroke that does not connect to anything on one end, like the top of a capital T or the middle of an E, is called an arm. The curving backbone that runs through the middle of an S, top to bottom, is called the spine.