Serif

In typography, a serif /ˈsɛrɪf/ is a small line attached to the end of a stroke in a letter or symbol. A typeface with serifs is called a serif typeface (or serifed typeface). A typeface without serifs is called sans serif or sans-serif, from the French sans, meaning "without". Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "Grotesque" (in German "grotesk") or "Gothic", and serif typefaces as "Roman".

Serifs originated in the Latin alphabet with inscriptional lettering—words carved into stone in Roman antiquity. The explanation proposed by Father Edward Catich in his 1968 book The Origin of the Serif is now broadly but not universally accepted: the Roman letter outlines were first painted onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brush marks, which flared at stroke ends and corners, creating serifs. Another theory is that serifs were devised to neaten the ends of lines as they were chiseled into stone.

The origin of the word serif is obscure, but apparently is almost as recent as the type style. In The British Standard of the Capital Letters contained in the Roman Alphabet, forming a complete code of systematic rules for a mathematical construction and accurate formation of the same (1813) by William Hollins, it defined surripses, usually pronounced "surriphs", as "projections which appear at the tops and bottoms of some letters, the O and Q excepted, at the beginning or end, and sometimes at each, of all". The standard also proposed that surripsis may be a Greek word derived from συν (together) and ριψις (projection).

In 1827, a Greek scholar Julian Hibbert printed with his own experimental uncial Greek types, remarking that the types of Giambattista Bodoni's Callimachus were "ornamented (or rather disfigured) by additions of what [he] believe[s] type-founders call syrifs or cerefs". The printer Thomas Curson Hansard referred to them as "ceriphs" in 1825. The oldest citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are 1830 for serif and 1841 for sans serif. The OED speculates that serif was a back-formation from sanserif. Webster's Third New International Dictionary traces serif to the Dutch noun schreef, meaning "line, stroke of the pen", related to the verb schrappen, "to delete, strike through". Schreef now also means "serif" in Dutch. (The relation between "schreef" and "schrappen" is documented by Van Veen and Van der Sijs in Etymologisch Woordenboek (Van Dale, 1997). Yet, "schreef" literally is past-tense of "schrijven" (to write). In her Chronologisch Woordenboek (Veen, 2001), Van der Sijs lists words by first known publication in the language area that is The Netherlands today. Van der Sijs: schrijven, 1100; schreef, 1350; schrappen, 1406. I.e. "schreef" is from "schrijven" (to write), not from "schrappen" (to scratch, eliminate by strike-through).)

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