What Is Blackletter? Gothic Script Styles Explained

Blackletter is a family of scripts and typefaces that developed in Western Europe in the 12th century and dominated manuscript and printed books for roughly four hundred years. The letters are condensed, heavy and angular, with broken curves and diamond-shaped terminals. Written in lines, they form a dark, regular texture, hence the English name.

It is also called gothic script, a label coined by Renaissance humanists who thought the style barbarous, naming it after the Goths. The label has nothing to do with the Goth subculture, though that subculture does use the style.

The main branches

Branch	Region and period	Look
Textura (Quadrata)	Northern France, Low Countries, England, 13th century on	Most rigid and vertical, strokes ending in square feet. The Gutenberg Bible type is a Textura
Rotunda	Italy and Spain	Rounder and more open
Schwabacher	Germany, 15th century on	Rounder with a less broken form
Fraktur	Germany, 16th century on	Pointed, curved strokes with broken bowls
Bastarda	France, Burgundy	A cursive, more fluid form

Fraktur is the best known today, because it was used widely in German printing until the 20th century. In English-speaking countries, the typeface style used for newspaper mastheads such as The New York Times is called Old English or blackletter.

Why the form looks the way it does

Blackletter derives from the writing of a broad-nib pen held at a fixed angle. Where Roman letters have round bowls, the pen’s chisel edge produces straight strokes joined at angles, and the curves of o and e break into facets. Medieval scribes compressed the letters to save expensive parchment and used pointed feet and diamond-shaped terminals instead of the flat serifs of Roman letters. As a result a lowercase n, m, u and i consist of nearly identical vertical strokes, so words are readable only through context and the careful spacing of the scribe.

Using blackletter

Use it for short, meaningful text: mastheads, certificates, album covers, beer labels, tattoos and logos. Avoid setting words in all capitals: blackletter capitals were designed as decorative initials, and a line of them is hard to read. In the tattoo font generator and old English text generator, the names usually appear in mixed case for this reason.

Blackletter in lettering

If you want to draw it, begin with a pen or a chisel marker held at 45 degrees and make the basic vertical stroke, called the minim, with a clear top and bottom edge. Every lowercase letter is built from minims and connecting hairlines. Practise a row of n, m, u until the spacing between stems is equal to the width of the white space inside the letter, which gives the characteristic rhythm. The what is lettering guide places blackletter among other hand styles.

Blackletter in fancy Unicode text

The Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block includes Fraktur and bold Fraktur alphabets: 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔠𝔨𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯 and 𝕭𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖗. They are Fraktur letters in particular, not Textura, so “gothic” text from a generator is always the German style. Some capitals, such as C, H, I, R and Z in regular Fraktur, sit in a different Unicode block for historical reasons (ℭ, ℌ, ℑ, ℜ, ℨ), which can lead to fonts mixing designs in a single word.

Common confusions

Blackletter is not Old English the language. See the FAQ above.
Blackletter is not black letter law, the legal term for well-settled legal principles, though the two phrases share the name.
Blackletter is not a script font in the strict sense: the letters are not joined.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between blackletter and fraktur?

Blackletter is the whole family of angular medieval scripts. Fraktur is one branch of it, developed in 16th-century Germany, with curved and pointed strokes that break the letter bowls. Every Fraktur typeface is blackletter, but Textura, Rotunda and Schwabacher are blackletter and not Fraktur.

Is blackletter the same as Old English font?

In everyday use, yes. Old English is a trade name for blackletter typefaces such as Old English Text MT, and has nothing to do with the Old English language, which was written in a different script. Tattoo shops and newspapers use the name for any gothic-looking lettering.

Why does blackletter look so dark on the page?

The strokes are drawn with a broad-nib pen held at a steady angle, and the letters are condensed with very little space between them. A page of Textura therefore forms a dense texture, close to a woven pattern, which gave the style its name: the page looks black.

Is blackletter hard to read?

It takes practice for modern readers. Letters such as the capitals, long s and the pairs u, n and m with identical stems are easy to misread. All-capital blackletter is particularly hard because the capitals were designed as initials, not for running text. It works best in short, lowercase-based words.