What Is an Ear in Typography?

Not every part of a letter has such an odd name as this one. The ear is a small stroke that sticks out of the top right of a lowercase g, like the ear on the side of a head. Its job is purely decorative, since the letter would be readable without it, but it is one of the most revealing details in a typeface. Two fonts that look nearly the same at a distance often have completely different ears.

Ear shapes

Typographers classify ears by how they leave the bowl:

• Horizontal: a short straight stroke pointing right, typical of Helvetica, Univers and Arial.
• Flicked up: a short curved stroke angled upward and outward, as in Garamond, Caslon and Baskerville.
• Vertical or hooked: a stroke that turns sharply up, found in some humanist and Venetian-style faces.
• Ball or teardrop: the ear ends in a dot, as in many Didone fonts.
• No ear at all: some geometric faces such as Futura leave the g as a clean single-story form with no ear, since the shape is meant to look drawn with a compass.

The ear’s weight and angle follow the typeface’s overall construction. A crisp, thin ear suits a high-contrast serif, while a plump rounded ear suits a friendly sans.

Single-story and double-story g

The ear’s story is tied to the two ways to build a lowercase g. In the double-story g, the traditional printed form, an upper bowl is connected by a link to a lower loop, and the ear projects from the upper bowl. In the single-story g, as in handwriting, the letter is a bowl with a stem and a hooked tail; it normally has no ear, or only a small flick. Neither is more correct. Many modern sans-serifs offer both as alternates, and educational fonts for children often use single-story forms because they match how pupils write.

How the ear connects to the rest of the letter

The ear is one of the small details that give type its voice. It balances the weight of the g’s descender and tail, which hang below the baseline, and it shifts the stroke ends away from collisions with the next letter. If you replace the ear with a stroke of different weight, the g instantly looks as if it belongs to a different font, and your eye tells you something is wrong even if you can not say what.

The ear in hand lettering

If you draw a double-story g you will immediately feel how awkward it is. A few tips:

1. Draw the upper bowl first, as a slightly smaller oval than the o in the same word.
2. Add the ear as a short stroke, no heavier than the thin strokes of the letter.
3. Draw the lower loop wider than the upper bowl, so the letter does not look top-heavy.
4. Check the ear against the letters on either side: if it touches the next letter, shorten it.

Many beginners swap to a single-story g in hand lettering because it is faster and flows better with joined script. That is a legitimate choice, as long as you use the same form each time.

In italic calligraphy, the ear of g is typically a short flick added after the bowl, finishing in a tapered terminal. The calligraphy for beginners guide shows how pressure and pen angle affect it.

The ear in Unicode text

Because the ear is a glyph feature, you can see how fonts differ by pasting the same fancy letter into different apps. A script g from the cursive text generator is drawn as a looped single-story letter, while the italic serif style takes the ear of whichever serif font your device uses, so it can vary between platforms. The shapes also come from the design of each glyph.

Common confusions

• Ear is not a serif. Serifs sit at the foot of stems; ears sit at the top right of the g bowl.
• Ear is not a spur. A spur is a small projection from a stem or bowl, such as the one at the bottom of a capital G in some faces.
• Ear is not the tail. The tail is the hooked stroke below the baseline.