Ligature (typography)
In
writing and
typography, a
ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. Generally, ligatures replace characters that occur next to each other when they share common components. A letter with an
accent mark is not usually called a ligature, though it would require a separate block of type just as a ligature does. Ligatures are a subset of a more general class of figures called "contextual forms", where the particular shape of a letter depends upon its context, such as surrounding letters or whether or not it appears at the end of a line.
Stylistic ligatures
 |
Two common ligatures: fi and fl |
One of the most common ligatures recognizable as such is "fi." Since the dot above a lowercase
i interferes with the loop on the lowercase
f, when "f" and "i" are printed next to each other, they are combined into a single figure with the dot absorbed into the "f", which appears as "fi"
(note that in some fonts this ligature is rendered as "fi", the two characters presented separately). This is just one of a series, which comprises ligatures for "fi", "fj" (represented in
English only in
fjord, but encountered in
Esperanto,
Norwegian, and other languages where "j" represents a vocalic or semi-vocalic sound), "fl", "ff", "ffi", and "ffl". Formerly there were the additional members for "fa", "fe", "fo", "fr", "fs", "ft", "fu", "fy", and for the set of "f" followed by a period (full stop), comma, or hyphen, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled "ff", though "fft" was omitted.
More ligatures were developed for
italic fonts rather than
Roman ones. Fonts in italics used the "
Long s" in ligatures for "sh", "sch", "sp", "st" and "sz" (the probable origin of the German esszet - ß) , among others mentioned on this page. There are also examples for the forms "as", "ch", "ck", "nd", "ng", and "ll". And there is one to make the tail for "Q" reach under a "u", though this was also done by
kerning or a character for "u" that included a tail sweep beneath it.
One Roman font by the French typefounder
Garamond has a
small capital ligature
Rx for use in prescriptions, short for the Latin word "recipe", meaning "take". The same font has a minuscule "l" linked to a following apostrophe, for use in such French phrases as "l'amour".
The cursive Snell Roundhand has a ligature "o'c" for the single use in the English phrase "o'clock", as its letter "o" has an extended flourish. For use in
ordinal numerals in English, the font has raised small minuscules for "nd", "rd", "st", and "th".
A Roman typeface by William Elder had a distinct "ll". He decorated the second "l" with a nib at
mean line height to both the left and right, and put it in a ligature so as to not get it confused with an ordinary "l", to which he gave just the nib to the left.
The
Requiem Italic by
Jonathan Hoefler is probably the only font that has designed the extremely rare
fffl ligature, to be used at least in two German words:
Sauerstoffflasche (oxygen tank) and
Sauerstoffflaschenspüler (oxygen tank cleanser). This same typeface has plenty of other unusual ligatures, such as
stfl for "mistflower",
cta for "octagon",
ttfr for "Gottfried", a German name,
tfl for "outflanked",
sfy for "satisfying",
ctfi for "factfinding",
stfi for "Eastfield" and
stfj for "Vestfjorden", and many others.
Zuzana Licko's typeface of
1996 called
Mrs Eaves comes with very many ligatures, which go beyond the "cky", "gi", "gy" and "tty" found in the italic to playful ones such as a linked "OG". Some unusual combinations are found in
Jack Yan's JY Integrity from
1995, including "gr", "gy", "tr", "tu" and "ty" in Roman and italic versions. Stylistic ligatures may become more common with the development of the OpenType technology, which allows automatic substitution of two separately typed letters in certain programs such as
Adobe InDesign CS.
Some typefaces primarily intended for signage include ligatures for the minor words in phrasal names of various languages. Examples include "and," "und," "of," "de," "for," and "het," in some presentations of
FF Golden Gate Gothic. These ligatures are underlined, tilted, and float above the typographical baseline; they serve to offset major words for this otherwise all-capital typeface.
The German
esszett ligature,
ß, was derived from the ligature "long s over round s". Even though "long s"
ſ has otherwise disappeared form German orthograpy, ß is still considered a ligature, and is replaced by
SS in capitalized spelling.
Letters originating as ligatures
The character
Æ (
æ) when used in the
Danish,
Norwegian, or
Icelandic languages, or
Old English, is not a typographical ligature. It is a distinct
letter (a
vowel) and when alphabetized, it is given a different place in the ordering, rather than coming between "ad" and "af". In modern English orthography, the same character is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant (
encyclopædia vs.
encyclopaedia or
encyclopedia)
This character derives from its use in
Latin, where it is an optional ligature in some words, for example,
Æneas. It is still found as a variant printing in English and French, but the trend has recently been towards printing the letters separately. Similarly, the ligature
' (
") while normally printed as such in French, can be replaced by its component letters if technical restrictions require it.
As the letter
W is a relatively new addition to the
Latin alphabet, the sound was originally written in various ways. In
Old English the
Runic letter Wynn (Ƿ) was used, but
Norman influence forced this character out. Later, two
Vs or
Us were written together. As seen in old typefaces, originally the two "V's" crossed in the middle. While VV developed into W, the modern Latin letter W is not a true ligature as it represents a different sound from VV/UU. Because it is relatively new, only four major European languages (English, Dutch, German, and Polish) use the letter in native words.
In
German orthography, while ß retains the status of a ligature, the
umlaut vowels,
ä ö ü are independent letters that historically arose from
ae,
oe,
ue ligatures. The
uo ligature,
ů saw use in
Early Modern High German, but it merged with
u (e.g.
MHG fuosz, EMHG
fůß,
Modern German Fuß "foot"), and survived as a variant for some time until it was discontinued.
The "
ring" diacritic in other orthographies (seen, for example, in
å) likewise originated as an
o-ligature.
Other
digraphs, like
ij in
Dutch and
ll in
Spanish or
Welsh may or may not be considered individual
letters, but they are not letters deriving from ligatures as in the examples above, since the shape of the constituent letters was not affected.
Symbols originating as ligatures
|
Et ligature in Insular Minuscule script. |
Perhaps the most common ligature is the
ampersand: "&". This was originally a ligature of 'Et',
Latin for 'and'. It has exactly the same use, except for pronunciation, in
French, and is used in the
English language just as in French. This character comes in many different forms. It is now not considered a ligature, but a
logogram (in English, it is pronounced
and, not
et). Similarly, the Dollar sign,
$ originated as a ligature but is now a logogram.
A ligature is not the only way of changing the appearance on the page. Besides allocating a particular arrangement as a ligature, the relative location of the characters can be altered by
kerning, something which has become easier with
phototypesetting, and above all, with
computer typography. The fonts for both the
Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based computers include a "dotless 'i'", which (aside from its necessity in printing
Turkish) facilitates
kerning "fi" and "Ti" instead of using a ligature.
Medieval scribes, writing in
Latin, conserved space and increased writing speed by combining characters. For example, in
blackletter, letters with right-facing bowls ("b", "o", and "p") and those with left-facing bowls ("c", "e", "o", and "q") would be written with the facing edges of the bowls superimposed. And in many forms of script, characters such as "h," "m", and "n" would have their vertical strokes superimposed. Scribes also added special marks called "
scribal abbreviations" to get rid of having to write a whole character "at a stroke". Manuscripts in the
fourteenth century, for example, would employ hundreds of such abbreviations.
When printing was invented, typefaces included many of these, now physical, blocks of type called ligatures. This was done not only because cheap paper had not yet been invented, but also in order to emulate the appearance of hand-lettered manuscripts. To do otherwise would have seemed to the readers as being talked down to, as a modern adult would feel when reading: "Ro•ver falls in•to the emp•ty per•am•bu•la•tor." In addition, ligatures were devised to enable typesetters to assemble Latin words quickly: the endings "us" and "is", and "ij" as a stylish medieval form of "ii" were made ligatures, too. There had been no need for special flourishes of the pen for these.
After printing was extended to modern languages, which didn't use scribal abbreviations, and as typesetting became more perfunctory, most of the earlier ligatures fell out of use, even for texts in Latin. One of the very last of these to remain resembled "q3". It had been used for the Latin ending "-quia", as shown here: [
1]
However, new ones were added by typefounders for the English language. The standard ones which remain are the "f" series listed above. Another series, quite resembling these, which used the "
long s" in place of the "f", disappeared in the
nineteenth century. Some fonts also contain a mixed-case "Th" ligature. In the 1920s, some Roman fonts were still being designed with special ligatures for "ct" and "st", ligatures which remain in many
italic typefaces, some of which even have one for "sp". (The last two do not use the "long s".) And in the
twentieth century, for the single word "
fjord", which has entered the English language from Norwegian, the ligature "fj" has come into existence.
It is only recently that computer-based typesetting has encouraged people to start using ligatures again (although "fine art" printers have used them all along). Generally, ligatures work best in typefaces which are derived from calligraphic letterforms. Also useful are contextual forms, such as
swash capitals,
terminal characters, and so on.
See also Complex Text Layout.Ligatures are not limited to Latin script. Some forms of the
Glagolitic script, used from Middle Ages to the 19th century to write some Slavic languages, have a "boxy" shape that leads to a more frequent use of ligatures. And in the
Arabic alphabet, which has a very "fluid" shape, there is usually ligature between every single letter.
A number of ligatures have been employed with the
Greek alphabet, in particular a ligature of omicron (Ο) and upsilon (Υ) which later gave rise to one of the letters of the
Cyrillic alphabet — see
Ou (letter).
Two letters of the Macedonian and Serbian
Cyrillic alphabets,
lje and
nje (
љ,
њ), were developed in the nineteenth century as ligatures of Cyrillic
El and
En (
л,
н) with the
soft sign (
ь).
Cyrillic ligatures: , ,
Ы,
.
Iotified Cyrillic letters are ligatures of the early Cyrillic
decimal I and another vowel:
ІА (not in Unicode, ancestor of
Я),
,
,
,
Ю (descended from another ligature,
Оу or , an early version of
У).
An example of a more general contextual form is the
Greek lowercase
sigma. When typesetting Greek, the selection of which sigma to use is determined by whether or not the letter occurs at the end of the word. From these particulars derived the rules for the "
long s" in Western languages formerly.
 |
Typical ligatures in Latin script |
TeX is an example of a computer typesetting system that makes use of ligatures automatically. The Computer Modern Roman typeface, which is provided with TeX, includes the five common ligatures ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. When TeX finds these letters juxtaposed in the text, it substitutes the appropriate ligature (unless overridden by the typesetter). Some believe that the writer should be able to decide whether to use a ligature or not; others that it is the job of a typesetter.
The
OpenType font format includes optional features for associating multiple
glyphs with a single glyph, used for ligature substitution. Typesetting software may or may not implement this feature, even if it is explicitly present in the font information. This type of substitution is used mainly for Arabic texts.
This table shows unligatured sets of letters on the left, the corresponding
Unicode ligature in the middle column, and the Unicode code points on the right. Provided you are using an
operating system and
user agent that can handle Unicode, and have the correct Unicode
fonts installed, some or all of these will display correctly.See also the provided graphic.
| Non-Ligature | Ligature! Unicode | | Et | & | U+0026 |
| - | ſs (or ſz) | ß | U+00DF |
| AE, ae | Æ, æ | U+00E6, U+00C6 |
| OE | ', ", ɶ | U+0152, U+0153, U+276 |
| IJ, ij | IJ | U+0132, U+0133 |
| Ng, ng | Ŋ, ŋ | U+014A, U+14B |
| Hv (Hw), hv (hw) | Ƕ, ƕ | U+01F6, U+0195 |
| DŽ, Dž, dž | DŽ, Dž, dž | U+01C4, U+01C5, U+01C6 |
| LJ, Lj, lj | LJ, Lj, lj | U+01C7, U+01C8, U+01C9 |
| NJ, Nj, nj | NJ, Nj, nj | U+01CA, U+01CB, U+01CC |
| DZ, Dz, dz | DZ, Dz, dz, ʣ | U+01F1, U+01F2, U+01F3, U+02A3 |
| l' | ɮ | U+026E |
| d' | ʤ | U+02A4 |
| dʑ | ʥ | U+02A5 |
| ts | ʦ | U+02A6 |
| tʃ | ʧ | U+02A7 |
| tɕ | ʨ | U+02A8 |
| fŋ | ʩ | U+02A9 |
| ls | ʪ | U+02AA |
| lz | ʫ | U+02AB |
| ww | ʬ | U+02AC |
| ue | ᵫ | U+1D6B |
| ff | | U+FB00 |
| fi | fi | U+FB01 |
| fl | fl | U+FB02 |
| ffi | | U+FB03 |
| ffl | | U+FB04 |
| ſt | | U+FB05 |
| st | | U+FB06 |
|
*
Danish alphabet*
Norwegian alphabet*
Icelandic alphabet*
German alphabet*
Complex Text Layout*
Blogdorf on ligatures*
Hoefler & Frere-Jones Requiem font*
Emigre: Mrs Eaves
