A Beginner's Guide to Typography Terms

Typography has its own vocabulary, and a handful of terms cover most of what you'll encounter. Here's a plain-language glossary.

Font vs typeface

A typeface is the design (e.g., Helvetica). A font is a specific file or style of it (Helvetica Bold, 12pt). In everyday use people say "font" for both — that's fine.

The terms worth knowing

• Weight: how thick the strokes are — thin, regular, bold, black.
• x-height: the height of lowercase letters. Taller x-heights generally read better at small sizes.
• Kerning: spacing between specific letter pairs.
• Tracking: overall letter spacing across a run of text.
• Leading: the vertical space between lines (called line-height in CSS).
• Ligature: two letters joined into one glyph, like "fi".
• Glyph: a single character's drawn form.

Why it helps

Knowing these terms makes font descriptions readable and design feedback precise. You don't need to memorize them — just recognize them when they come up, and the rest of typography gets much less mysterious.