Font

How to spell font

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce font

What does font mean?

1. nounA set of printed or displayed characters in one particular design and style.
2. nounA basin in a church that holds the water used for baptism.

Font in a sentence

• She changed the font on her resume to something cleaner and more modern.

• The priest poured water from the stone font over the baby's head.

• The contract specified a minimum font size of twelve points for readability.

• A medieval font carved from marble stood near the church entrance.

Where does font come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This little word carries two separate histories that happen to land on the same spelling. The older sense, the basin holding baptismal water in a church, comes straight from the Latin fons, meaning a fountain or spring, the natural source from which water bubbles up; it entered Old English well before the Norman Conquest and kept its watery associations. The printing sense arrived much later and by a different road: it derives from the French fonte, meaning a casting or founding, built on the verb fondre, to melt, which itself goes back to the Latin fundere, to pour or melt. A font in that trade was originally a complete set of metal type of one size and style, all cast together in a single founding. English took the printing word in the seventeenth century and spelled it variously as fount and font, with font eventually winning out, especially once computers made the term everyday. Because both threads trace back to Latin ideas of pouring and flowing, the single modern spelling is unusually tidy for a word with such mixed parentage.

How the word is built

• font (from Latin fons: fountain, spring; the printing sense from French fonte: a casting, from fondre: to melt)