Typophile

Underscore Lowercase Characters (Terminology, Significance, Usage)

BlueEyedPeas

This might be basic typography knowledge, but unbeknown to a beginner like me.

I have seen some signage + fonts where certain characters like the "o" or the "c" have an underscore, they appear to be set in lowercase even when the rest of the characters are uppercase. I'm not sure what the exact terminology for these characters are, hence I'm at a loss on how to do even a basic Google search.

Attached is a screenshot of FF Typeface Six that contains these characters.

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o! Canada.jpg78.06 KB
Fontgrube

The technical term for that is "fancy". Like for naming a typeface Typeface Six (instead of Typeface 169,506) or a TV channel "Channel 5".

SCNR Andreas

BlueEyedPeas

Fancy as in "ligature"?
Is there anywhere I can read up more on this?

paragraph

Three uses come to my mind: abbreviation for number as in No or Mc in Irish/Scottish names, and I vaguely remember a thread about street signs where underlined t in St, d in Rd figured, but I cannot find it.

Craig Eliason

That thread.

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In some cases they’re ordinals comparable to the English 1st and second, you might also see abbreviations such as No. or St. handled this way. The bar is added to keep it from creating a giant white hole under the letters. It looks cool, so some type designers have made an affectation out of it.

Captured from web.archive.org on 8 Mar 2015. view this capture