Super Glossary

Italics

Entertainment / Literature / Italics: A style of printing in which the tops of letters and punctuation marks gently slope to the right. Italics are often used by typesetters to indicate greater emphasis for a word or phrase. Other typesetters use italics to differentiate between various types of material. Foreign phrases such as Latin, French, and Spanish expressions are often placed in italic fonts to differentiate them from the rest of the sentence in English. Linguists and grammarians also use italics to indicate that a word or term is being discussed as a word per se. Finally, it is conventional to italicize or underline the titles of various long literary and major artistic works. You can click here for extended discussion of these conventions. Note that in handwritten documents in which italics are not clearly visible, it is preferable to indicate the italics by underlining the word. Many editors and publishers also call for underlining in any document presented for publication, and the typesetters ultimately will convert the underlined words to italics in the final published version. This policy does lead to complications with HTML text, in which an underlined word or phrase normally indicates a hyperlink rather than a title. Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515 CE) invented the italic typeface.
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