Font
name, noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A receptacle in a church for holy water, especially one used in baptism.
"She dipped her fingers in the font and crossed herself."
- 2 A set of glyphs of unified design, belonging to one typeface (e.g., Helvetica), style (e.g., italic), and weight (e.g., bold). Usually representing the letters of an alphabet and its supplementary characters.; In metal typesetting, a set of type sorts in one size.
- 3 A source, wellspring, fount. figuratively
"1824 — George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto V A gaudy taste; for they are little skill'd in The arts of which these lands were once the font"
- 4 bowl for baptismal water wordnet
- 5 A receptacle for lamp oil in a lamp.
Show 6 more definitions
- 6 A set of glyphs of unified design, belonging to one typeface (e.g., Helvetica), style (e.g., italic), and weight (e.g., bold). Usually representing the letters of an alphabet and its supplementary characters.; In phototypesetting, a set of patterns forming glyphs of any size, or the film they are stored on.
- 7 a specific size and style of type within a type family wordnet
- 8 A set of glyphs of unified design, belonging to one typeface (e.g., Helvetica), style (e.g., italic), and weight (e.g., bold). Usually representing the letters of an alphabet and its supplementary characters.; In digital typesetting, a set of glyphs in a single style, representing one or more alphabets or writing systems, or the computer code representing it.
- 9 A typeface. informal
- 10 A computer file containing the code used to draw and compose the glyphs of one or more typographic fonts on a computer display or printer. metonymically
"They bought a license for the Gulliver font and installed that font on several machines."
- 11 The design of any text. informal
"I like the font of this logo."
- 1 To overlay (text) on the picture. informal, transitive
"When figures or quotes are thought helpful to understanding a spot, they're "fonted" over the cover picture."
- 1 # Clipping of Fontainebleau: a town near Paris, in Seine-et-Marne department, Île-de-France, France. informal
- 2 A surname
Example
More examples"In the font business you must never trust anybody!"
Etymology
From Old English font, an early borrowing from Latin fōns, fontis (“fountain”).
From Middle French fonte (“act or process of founding or melting; act of producing items from molten metal; cast iron; set of type”) (modern French fonte), either: * from fondre (“to melt, melt down; to smelt”), from Old French fondre, from Latin fundere, the present active infinitive of fundō (“to pour out; to make by smelting, found”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰewd- (“to pour”); or * from Late Latin *fundita, a noun use of funditus, a perfect passive participle form of Latin fundō (see above; the classical Latin form is fūsus).
Apparently from fount, with influence from the senses above (under etymology 1).
Clipping of Fontainebleau.
* As a southern French and Catalan surname, from font (“spring, well”). * As an English surname, variant of Fant.
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.