What Is a Serif?
By Maya Chen, lettering designer and type educator · Checked by Jordan Hale · · How we review content
A serif is the small stroke added to the end of a larger stroke in a letter. Look at the bottom of a capital I in Times New Roman: the flat, horizontal feet at the top and bottom of the stem are serifs. In Arial or Helvetica, the same letter is a plain bar. A typeface with those ends is a serif typeface, and one without is sans-serif.
Where serifs came from
The usual explanation is that serifs descend from Roman inscriptions, in which a stonecutter finished each stroke with a small flare or cross-cut so that the end was clean. Calligraphers writing with a broad-nib pen produced similar entry and exit marks. The first printed typefaces of the 15th century copied handwriting, and with it the serifs. The anatomy has stayed even in digital fonts.
Types of serif
Typographers classify serifs by shape and by the style of the whole design:
| Family | Typical features | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Old-style | Moderate stroke contrast, slanted stress, bracketed serifs | Garamond, Caslon |
| Transitional | Higher contrast, more vertical stress | Baskerville, Times New Roman |
| Didone (modern) | Extreme contrast, hairline flat serifs, vertical stress | Bodoni, Didot |
| Slab | Heavy, rectangular serifs, low contrast | Rockwell, Courier |
A bracket is the curved joint between the serif and the stem. Old-style faces have strong brackets; Didone faces have almost none, so the hairline serif meets the stem at a sharp angle.
Blackletter styles, which also derive from broad-nib writing, have diamond-shaped feet instead of flat serifs, and so are classified separately as blackletter.
Serif in lettering and handwriting
Lettering artists draw serifs deliberately, as part of the construction of a word: a serif can be a hairline, a wedge or a block, and it changes the personality of the lettering more than changes in letter shapes. For beginners, a good exercise is to draw skeleton letters first, add weight to the vertical strokes, then finish each stem with a consistent serif. If the serifs differ from letter to letter, the word looks amateur even when the shapes are good. This build-up method is the core of lettering as described in what is lettering, and our serif vs sans-serif guide compares the two styles in detail.
School cursive is not a serif style; its entry and exit strokes belong to the joining system, not to a decorative terminal.
Serif in fancy Unicode text
The Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block has serif and sans-serif versions of bold and italic letters. For example, the bold text generator can output bold serif 𝐀𝐛𝐜 as well as bold sans 𝗔𝗯𝗰, and the italic text generator has serif 𝐴𝑏𝑐 and sans 𝘈𝘣𝘤 versions. They are separate characters, so the choice is preserved when copied, but the actual drawing is up to the font on the reader’s device. For that reason, the serif details, such as bracket and contrast, vary across platforms.
Common confusions
- Serif is not a font name. It is a feature. “Serif” in CSS is a generic family that maps to a default such as Times.
- Serif is not the same as formal. Slab faces feel sturdy and modern, not traditional.
- Sans-serif is not “better for screens”. That belonged to early low-resolution displays; modern screens render both well.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the word serif come from?
Are serif fonts easier to read than sans-serif fonts?
What are the main kinds of serif?
Is the Unicode bold serif style a real serif font?
Related terms
- What Is Sans Serif?Sans serif describes a typeface whose letters have no serifs, the small finishing strokes at the ends of stems. The term is French for "without serif"; Helvetica, Arial and Futura are common examples.
- What Is a Slab Serif?A slab serif is a serif typeface with thick, rectangular serifs and little contrast between thick and thin strokes. Rockwell, Clarendon and Courier are well-known examples, and the style is also called Egyptian.
- What Is a Display Font?A display font is a typeface designed to be used at large sizes, such as headlines, posters, logos and packaging, where personality matters more than comfort in long reading. It is the counterpart of a text typeface.
- What Is Blackletter?Blackletter, also called gothic script, is a family of dense, angular writing styles used in Western Europe from the 12th century. Textura, Rotunda, Schwabacher and Fraktur are its main branches; Old English is a trade name for blackletter type.
- Typography & Lettering GlossaryThe Typography & Lettering Glossary defines twenty terms that type designers and letterers use every day, from kerning and x-height to serif, ligature and blackletter. Each entry gives a precise definition, then shows what the idea means for hand lettering and for the styled Unicode text our generators produce.
- What Is an Ampersand? Origin of the & SymbolThe ampersand is the symbol & meaning "and". It began as a handwritten ligature of the Latin word et, its name comes from the old schoolroom phrase "and per se and", and many typefaces draw it in strikingly elaborate ways.