In
typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), and ...
, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a
font
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design.
In mod ...
in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them.
It is the equivalent of
prosody stress in speech.
Methods and use
The most common methods in
Western typography fall under the general technique of emphasis through a change or modification of font: ''italics'', boldface and . Other methods include the alteration of LETTER CASE and
spacing as well as and *additional graphic marks*.
Font styles and variants
The human eye is very receptive to differences in "brightness within a text body." Therefore, one can differentiate between types of emphasis according to whether the emphasis changes the "
blackness" of text, sometimes referred to as typographic color.
A means of emphasis that does not have much effect on blackness is the use of ''
italics
In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right. Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed tex ...
'', where the text is written in a script style, or ''
oblique
Oblique may refer to:
* an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / )
* Oblique angle, in geometry
*Oblique triangle, in geometry
*Oblique lattice, in geometry
* Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the b ...
'', where the vertical orientation of each letter of the text is slanted to the left or right. With one or the other of these techniques (usually only one is available for any typeface), words can be highlighted without making them stand out much from the rest of the text (inconspicuous stressing). This is used for marking passages that have a different context, such as book titles, words from foreign languages, or internal dialogue.
By contrast, a bold
font weight
In movable type, metal typesetting, a font is a particular #Characteristics, size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "Sort (typesetting), sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of ...
makes letters of a text thicker than the surrounding text.
Bold strongly stands out from regular text, and is often used to highlight keywords important to the text's content. For example, printed dictionaries often use boldface for their keywords, and the names of entries can conventionally be marked in bold.
Small capitals
In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are grapheme, characters typeset with glyphs that resemble letter case, uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding letter case, lowercase letters ...
are also used for emphasis, especially for the first line of a section, sometimes accompanied by or instead of a
drop cap
In a written or published work, an initial capital, also referred to as a drop capital or simply an initial cap, initial, initcapital, initcap or init or a drop cap or drop, is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph tha ...
, or for personal names as in bibliographies.
If the text body is typeset in a
serif typeface
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 ( ...
, it is also possible to highlight words by setting them in a
sans serif
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...
face. This practice is often considered archaic in Latin script, and on computers is complicated since fonts are no longer issued by foundries with a standard baseline, so switching font may distort line spacing. It is still possible using some
font super families, which come with matching serif and sans-serif variants, though these are not generally supplied with modern computers as system fonts. In Japanese typography, due to the reduced legibility of heavier
Minchō
Ming or Song is a category of typefaces used to display Chinese characters, which are used in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. They are currently the most common style of type in print for Chinese and Japanese.
Name
The names ' ...
type, the practice remains common.
Of these methods, italics, small capitals and
capitalization are oldest, with bold type and sans-serif typefaces not arriving until the nineteenth century.
Capitalization
The
house styles House style may refer to:
* Standards for writing as specified in the internal style guide of a particular institution, for example, a book publishing company, newspaper, professional organization, or university
* Standards for illustration or graph ...
of many publishers in the United States use
all caps text for:
*
chapter and section headings;
* newspaper
headline
The headline or heading is the text indicating the content or nature of the article below it, typically by providing a form of brief summary of its contents.
The large type ''front page headline'' did not come into use until the late 19th centur ...
s;
*
publication
To publish is to make content available to the general public.[Berne Conve ...](_blank)
titles;
*
warning messages; and
* words of important meaning.
Capitalization is used much less frequently by British publishers, and usually only for book titles.
All-uppercase letters are a common substitute form of emphasis where the medium lacks support for boldface, such as old
typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectivel ...
s, plain-text
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
,
SMS
Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...
and other text-messaging systems.
Socially, the use of all-caps text in Roman languages has become an indicator of shouting when quoting speech. It was also often used in the past by American lawyers to flag important points in a legal text.
Coinciding with the era of typewriter use, the practice became unnecessary with the advent of computerized text formatting, although it is still found on occasion in documents created by older lawyers.
Letter-spacing
Another means of emphasis is to increase the spacing between the letters, rather than making them darker, but still achieving a distinction in blackness. This results in an effect reverse to boldface: the emphasized text becomes lighter than its environment. This is often used in
blackletter
Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...
typesetting and
typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectivel ...
manuscripts, but by no means restricted to those situations.
This ''
letter-spacing
Examples of headline letter spacing
In typography, letter spacing, character spacing or tracking is an optically consistent adjustment to the space between letters to change the visual density of a line or block of text. Letter spacing is distin ...
'' is referred to as ''sperren'' in German, which could be translated as "spacing out": in typesetting with letters of lead, the spacing would be achieved by inserting additional non-printing slices of metal between the types, usually about an eighth of an em wide. On typewriters a full space was used between the letters of an emphasized word and also one before and one after the word.
For black letter type boldface was not feasible, since the letters were very dark in their standard format, and on (most) typewriters only a single type was available. Although letter-spacing was common, sometimes different typefaces (e.g.
Schwabacher
The German word Schwabacher (pronounced ) refers to a specific style of blackletter typefaces which evolved from Gothic Textualis (''Textura'') under the influence of Humanist type design in Italy during the 15th century. Schwabacher typesetti ...
inside
Fraktur
Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. The blackletter lines are broken up; that is, their forms contain many angles when compared to the curves of the Antiqu ...
), underlining or colored, usually red ink were used instead.
Since blackletter type remained in use in German speaking parts of Europe
much longer than anywhere else, the custom of letter-spacing is sometimes seen as specific to German, although it has been used with other languages, including English. Especially in German, however, this kind of emphasis may also be used within modern type, e.g. where italics already serve another semantic purpose (as in linguistics) and where no further means of emphasis (e.g. small caps) are easily available or feasible. Its professional use today is very limited in German. This use of spacing is also traditionally found in Polish.
German orthographic (or rather typographic) rules require that the mandatory blackletter
ligatures are retained. That means, ''ſt'', ''ch'', ''ck'', and ''tz'' are still stuck together just as the letter ''
ß'', whereas optional, additional ligatures like ''ff'' and ''ſi'' are broken up with a (small) space in between. Other writing systems did not develop such sophisticated rules since spacing was so uncommon therein.
In
Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = G ...
typography, it also used to be common to emphasize words using letter-spaced type. This practice for Cyrillic has become obsolete with the availability of Cyrillic italic and small capital fonts.
Underlining
Professional Western typesetting usually does not employ lines under letters for emphasis within running text, because it is considered too distracting. Underlining is, however, often used with typewriters, in handwriting and with some non-alphabetic scripts. It is also used for secondary emphasis, i.e. marks added by the reader and not the author.
Overlining
In Arabic, it is traditional to emphasize text by drawing a line over the letters. This is seen in the
Quran
The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Classical Arabic, Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation in Islam, revelation from God in Islam, ...
, where the word at which
Sujud Tilawa
The prostration of recitation ( ar, سجود التلاوة, ''sujud tilawa'') is a prostration (''sujud'') which occurs during the ritual Tilawa of Quran in Salah or outside it.
Presentation
Defining the prostration of recitation (''tilawa'') a ...
is performed is overlined.
Punctuation marks
![Emphasis mark (vertical)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Emphasis_mark_%28vertical%29.png)
Sometimes quotation marks are used for emphasis. However, this clashes with the general understanding of how the marks are properly used, particularly
scare quotes
Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes,Pinker, Steven. ''The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century''. Penguin (2014) sneer quotes, and quibble marks) are quotation marks that writers place around a word o ...
, and can leave the reader with a different impression than intended.
In
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...
, emphasis in body text is supposed to be indicated by using an "
emphasis mark
The emphasis mark or emphasis dot is a typographic marking used in some East Asian languages to indicate emphasis. The markings takes in many forms like, a dot or a bullet, a circle, or a triangle. It was used more traditionally, but nowadays, ...
" (着重號/着重号), which is a dot placed under each character to be emphasized. This is still taught in schools but in practice it is not usually done, probably due to the difficulty of doing this using most computer software. Consequently, methods used for emphasis in Western text are often used instead, even though they are considered inappropriate for Chinese (for example, the use of underlining or setting text in
oblique type
Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted. Oblique and it ...
).
In
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
texts, when katakana would be inappropriate, emphasis is indicated by "emphasis dots" (
圏点 or
傍点) placed above the
kanji
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...
and any accompanying
furigana
is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller kana or syllabic characters printed either above or next to kanji (logographic characters) or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also known ...
in
horizontal writing
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form ...
and to the right in
vertical writing
Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese Hán- Nôm and Korean scripts can be oriented along either axis, as they consist mainly of disconnected logographic or syllabic units, each occu ...
. Japanese also has an "emphasis line" (
傍線) used in a similar manner, but less frequently.
In
Korea
Korea ( ko, 한국, or , ) is a peninsular region in East Asia. Since 1945, it has been divided at or near the 38th parallel, with North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) comprising its northern half and South Korea (Republic o ...
n texts, a dot is placed above each
Hangul
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The let ...
syllable block or
Hanja
Hanja (Hangul: ; Hanja: , ), alternatively known as Hancha, are Chinese characters () used in the writing of Korean. Hanja was used as early as the Gojoseon period, the first ever Korean kingdom.
(, ) refers to Sino-Korean vocabulary, wh ...
to be emphasized.
In
Armenian
Armenian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent
** Armenian Diaspora, Armenian communities across the ...
the
շեշտ (''šešt'') sign is used.
On
website
A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...
s and other
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
services, as with
typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectivel ...
s,
rich text
Rich may refer to:
Common uses
* Rich, an entity possessing wealth
* Rich, an intense flavor, color, sound, texture, or feeling
** Rich (wine), a descriptor in wine tasting
Places United States
* Rich, Mississippi, an unincorporated commun ...
is not always available.
Asterisk
The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...
s are sometimes used for emphasis (as in "That was *really* bad"). Less commonly,
underscore
An underscore, ; also called an underline, low line, or low dash; is a line drawn under a segment of text. In proofreading, underscoring is a convention that says "set this text in italic type", traditionally used on Manuscript (publishing), man ...
s may be used, resembling underlining ("That was _really_ bad").
Period
Period may refer to:
Common uses
* Era, a length or span of time
* Full stop (or period), a punctuation mark
Arts, entertainment, and media
* Period (music), a concept in musical composition
* Periodic sentence (or rhetorical period), a concept ...
s can be used between words (as in "That. was. really. bad.") to emphasize whole sentences, mimicking when somebody slows down their speech for impact. In some cases, the engine behind the text area being parsed will render the text and the asterisks in bold automatically after the text is submitted.
Markdown
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown is ...
is a common formalization of this concept.
Color
Colors are important for emphasizing. Important words in a text may be colored differently from others. For example, many dictionaries use a different color for
headword
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural ''lemmas'' or ''lemmata'') is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' a ...
s, and some religious texts color the words of deities red, commonly referred to as
rubric
A rubric is a word or section of text that is traditionally written or printed in red ink for emphasis. The word derives from the la, rubrica, meaning red ochre or red chalk, and originates in Medieval illuminated manuscripts from the 13th cent ...
. In
Ethiopic script, red is used analogously to italics in Latin text.
Post-print emphasis added by a reader is often done with
highlighter
A highlighter is a type of writing device used to mark attention to sections of text by marking them with a vivid, translucent colour.
A typical highlighter is fluorescent yellow, colored with pyranine. Different compounds, such as rhodamines ( R ...
s which add a bright background color to usual black-on-white text.
Design
![Othello F1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Othello_F1.jpg)
There are many designs. With both italics and boldface, the emphasis is correctly achieved by swapping into a different
font
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design.
In mod ...
of the same family; for example by replacing body text in
Arial
Arial (also called Arial MT) is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.1 on, some other Microsoft software appli ...
with its bold or italic style. Professional typographic systems, including most modern computers, would therefore not simply tilt letters to the right to achieve italics (that is instead referred to as
''slanting'' or ''oblique''), print them twice or darker for boldface, or scale majuscules to the height of middle-chamber minuscules (like ''x'' and ''o'') for small-caps, but instead use entirely different typefaces that achieve the effect. The letter 'w', for example, looks quite different in italic compared to upright.
As a result, typefaces therefore have to be supplied at least fourfold (with computer systems, usually as four font files): as regular, bold, italic, and bold italic to provide for all combinations. Professional typefaces sometimes offer even more variations for popular fonts, with varying degrees of blackness. Only if such fonts are not available should the effect of italic or boldface be imitated by algorithmically altering the original font.
The modern Latin-alphabet system of fonts appearing in two standard weights, with the styles being regular (or "Roman"), italic, bold and bold italic is a relatively recent development, dating to the early twentieth century. Modern "Roman" type was developed around the 1470s, while italic type was developed around 1500 and was commonly used for emphasis by the early 17th century. Bold type did not arrive until the nineteenth century, and at first fonts did not have matching bold weights; instead a generic bold, sometimes a
Clarendon or other kind of
slab-serif
In typography, a slab serif (also called ''mechanistic'', ''square serif'', ''antique'' or ''Egyptian'') typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular ( Rockwell), ...
, would be swapped in.
In some books printed before bold type existed, emphasis could be shown by switching to
blackletter
Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...
.
Some font families intended for professional use in documents such as business reports may also make the bold-style numbers take up the same width as the regular (non-bold) numbers, so a bold-style total lines up below the digits of the sum in regular style.
Recommendations and requirements
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
professor
Larry Trask
Robert Lawrence Trask (10 November 1944 – 27 March 2004) was an American–British professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, and an authority on the Basque language and the field of historical linguistics.
Biography
Born in Ole ...
stated that "It is possible to write an entire word or phrase in capital letters in order to emphasize it", but adds that "On the whole, though, it is preferable to express emphasis, not with capital letters, but with italics." Many university researchers and academic journal editors advise not to use italics, or other approaches to emphasizing a word, unless essential, for example the Modern Language Association "discourages the use of italics in academic prose to emphasize or point, because they are unnecessary—most often, the unadorned words do the job without typographic assistance".
Although emphasis is useful in speech, and so has a place in informal or journalistic writing, in academic traditions it is often suggested that italics are only used where there is a danger of misunderstanding the meaning of the sentence, and even in that case that rewriting the sentence is preferable; in formal writing the reader is expected to interpret and understand the text themselves, without the assumption that the precise intended interpretation of the author is correct. Italics are principally used in academic writing for texts that have been referenced, and for foreign language words. Similarly capitals and underlining have particular meanings, and are rarely used in formal writing for emphasis.
References
External links
{{Typography terms
Typography