Nuts and Bolts: F ligatures.

 Have you ever noticed how some fonts miss out the dot over the letter i?

No, I don't expect you have (unless you read a language like Turkish, where the distinction between an i with a dot and one without is important).

But you'll have seen loads of i s (or ies, if you prefer) without dots, all the same.

They come after f s.

In the font used on The Word Den it doesn't happen - look - 

fiction 

- see? the dot is there, though it's squashed up against the end of the hood of the f. But quite often the letters f and i together will be one joined letter with a slightly rounder end of the hood which forms the dot of the i.

Like this:

Font by Claude Garamond. The letters after the Qu are old-fashioned long esses.

Letters have been joined by ligatures almost as long as there has been writing. It makes writing quicker, and it makes printing with movable type quicker, too.

The f ligatures are especially interesting because they fell out of fashion when word-processing first started in the twentieth century because there was no typewriter key to make them, and the machines didn't have the processing power to think of putting them in automatically.

Now, however, computers have caught up, and we're getting them back again.

I know they are only really matters of beauty. But I'm very glad to see them, all the same.

Thing To Spot Today: one with an fl or an ff or an fi in it. If you're lucky you might be able to find it in a book printed before 1970 or so, and you can admire the ligature.