Typography
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50 free Typography trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Typography is the craft of making written language readable and good to look at, and almost everyone uses it daily without knowing its vocabulary. Every menu, road sign, novel and phone screen is the result of choices about letter shapes, spacing and layout that someone made on purpose. This quiz covers the ground a first typography course does. It starts with the parts of a letter and the terms for the space between letters, words and lines, moves on to how typefaces are classified and what sets one class apart from another, and then meets the well-known typefaces, the people who drew them and the stories behind their names. There are also questions on the history of printing, on odd punctuation marks, and on setting type for the web with CSS. It is written for design students revising for a class quiz, working designers who want to test themselves, and anyone curious about why some pages simply look right. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the questions for a group.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which typeface, drawn by Chris Costello in 1982, did a Saturday Night Live sketch mock for its use in Avatar?
Papyrus
Papyrus earned Costello just $750 when he sold the rights, although it has shipped on almost every personal computer since 1997. Ryan Gosling starred in the 2017 sketch.
Q 02Which casual typeface did Microsoft's Vincent Connare model on the lettering of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns?
Comic Sans
Comic Sans was drawn for the speech bubbles of the cartoon guides in Microsoft Bob, but it was finished too late to be included. CERN physicists later used it to present the Higgs boson results.
Q 03Which Reed College course, audited by Steve Jobs after he left his degree, did he credit for the Mac's many typefaces?
Calligraphy
Calligraphy at Reed was taught by Robert Palladino. Jobs later said that without that single course the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
Q 04In the typographic term 'sans-serif', the word 'sans' is borrowed from which language, where it means 'without'?
French
French supplies the 'sans', while 'serif' is of uncertain origin and may come from the Dutch word schreef, meaning a line or pen-stroke.
Q 05Which Swiss typeface, first sold as Neue Haas Grotesk, was later renamed using the Latin word for 'Swiss'?
Helvetica
Helvetica beat the first suggestion, Helvetia, which a sewing machine maker and an insurance company were already using. A 2007 documentary film marked its fiftieth anniversary.
Q 06Which word for a worn-out phrase began as printers' jargon for a metal plate that reproduced the same page endlessly?
Cliché
Cliché comes from a verb meaning 'to click', supposedly echoing the sound of a mould striking metal. Its sense of a trite expression is first recorded in 1888.
Q 07Which pair of terms comes from the two trays in which printers kept their metal letters?
Uppercase and lowercase
Uppercase and lowercase began as furniture: metal type was sorted into shallow wooden drawers called type cases, and the capitals lived in the higher one.
Q 08Which word, paired with 'jot' in the King James Bible, names the small dot above the letters i and j?
Tittle
Tittle appears in the Gospel verse promising that not 'one jot or one tittle' of the law will pass away. That line is why 'jot and tittle' now means every last detail.
Q 09Which symbol, found on every keyboard, began as ancient scribes' joined-up way of writing the Latin word 'et'?
Ampersand
Ampersand is a corruption of 'and per se and', the phrase once used when naming the symbol by itself. In some typefaces the letters e and t can still be made out.
Q 10Font menus preview typefaces with 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' because it is which kind of sentence?
A pangram
A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet at least once, so a single line shows off a whole typeface. Mark Dunn's novel Ella Minnow Pea builds its plot around this very sentence.
Q 11Which spacing adjustment, named after overhanging bits of metal type, fine-tunes the gap between letter pairs like AV?
Kerning
Kerning was so laborious in metal type that printers saved it for the combinations that needed it most. Digital fonts made it far easier to adjust many more.
Q 12Which term for the space between lines of text comes from the metal strips typesetters slid between rows of type?
Leading
Leading is pronounced 'ledding' because those strips were made of lead. Word processors usually call the same setting line spacing.
Q 13In letters such as g, p and y, which name is given to the stroke that hangs below the baseline?
Descender
Descender strokes defeated some early computer displays, which had no room beneath the line and simply shifted letters like g and y upwards.
Q 21Which class of serif typeface, born in the late 1700s, pairs hairline serifs with stark thick-and-thin contrast?
Didone
Didone fuses the surnames of the typefounders Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni, who defined the look. In its heyday the style was simply called modern.
Q 22Sans-serif typefaces like Gill Sans and Frutiger, shaped by handwriting and classical capitals, belong to which class?
Humanist
Humanist designs take their inspiration from traditional letterforms, such as the square capitals of ancient inscriptions and older serif typefaces, rather than from pure geometry.
Q 23Slab serif typefaces were sold in the 1800s under which nickname, despite having no link to the place it names?
Egyptian
Q 14Which dimension of a typeface, named after a single letter, shows how tall small letters like a, e and o stand?
X-height
X-height runs from the baseline to the mean line, the level where most small letters stop. Sans-serif faces built for big display text, such as Impact, often have especially tall ones.
Q 15Which term names the space inside letters such as o and c, whose opening to the outside is called an aperture?
Counter
Counter spaces can be closed, as in o, or open, as in c. A double-storey g, the kind with a loop for a tail, has two closed ones.
Q 16Which term describes two or more letters fused into a single printed character, as f and i often are in books?
Ligature
Ligature forms such as fi exist because the hood of the f collides with the dot of the i in many typefaces, so the pair is combined into one glyph.
Q 17Which property of a typeface do the labels thin, light, regular, semibold and black describe?
Weight
Weight is how thick or thin a typeface's strokes are. Web pages record it as a number, with 400 standing for normal text and 700 for bold.
Q 18Which kind of typeface, standard on typewriters and in code editors, gives a narrow i the same width as a wide m?
Monospaced
Monospaced type keeps every character in a tidy column, which makes source code easier to read because similar-looking symbols are harder to confuse.
Q 19Which slanted style of type did Venetian printer Aldus Manutius introduce to print small, easily carried books?
Italic
Italic type is named after Italy, where it was first designed. Manutius had his cut by Francesco Griffo, who later fell out with him and claimed to have conceived it.
Q 20Which term for evenly adjusting the space between all letters in a block of text is written in CSS as letter-spacing?
Tracking
Tracking could only go one way in the days of metal type: letters could be set further apart, never closer. Digital type can tighten them as well.
Egyptian was pure fashion: Napoleon's campaign had left the public fascinated with the country, and type founders borrowed the name. The first types so called were actually sans-serifs.
Q 24Which family of dense, angular typefaces, the style of Gutenberg's Bible, survives in many newspaper nameplates?
Blackletter
Blackletter is popularly known as Gothic. Newspapers keep it in their nameplates because it evokes the origins of the printing press and lends the title gravitas.
Q 25Which serif typeface did adviser Stanley Morison create with Victor Lardent for a British daily newspaper in 1931?
Times New Roman
Times New Roman replaced a spindly nineteenth-century face after Morison urged the paper to adopt a more robust design. He based it on an older type named Plantin.
Q 26Which geometric typeface by Paul Renner, a favourite of Stanley Kubrick, fills the titles of Wes Anderson's early films?
Futura
Futura is built from near-perfect circles, triangles and squares. Renner shared the Bauhaus taste for modern forms, although he was never associated with the school.
Q 27Which typeface, inspired by old New York building signs, became the lettering of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign posters?
Gotham
Gotham began as a commission from GQ magazine. Designer Tobias Frere-Jones walked Manhattan with a camera and drew on signs such as the one on the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Q 28Which typeface, designed by Howard Kettler for IBM in the 1950s, is the industry standard for writing screenplays?
Courier
Courier got its name because Kettler felt a letter could be 'the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability'. IBM never trademarked it, so the name is free for anyone to use.
Q 29Carol Twombly's Adobe typeface, a staple of film posters, copies capitals carved on which emperor's column in Rome?
Trajan
Trajan was drawn from a full-size rubbing of the inscription at the column's base. It appears on so many film posters that satirical videos have dubbed it 'the movie font'.
Q 30Which statesman of ancient Rome wrote the essay that was scrambled to make the 'lorem ipsum' filler text?
Cicero
Cicero's original passage argues that pleasure should be sought rationally rather than on impulse. The garbled version spread in the 1960s on Letraset transfer sheets.