Typophile

What do you call the tip of a capital Q?

What do you call the part that sticks out of a capital Q? Is there a name for it? What would you refer to it as if you were designing something and needed to write about that part of the q?

Tail.

Thanks I was going to call it the tail or leg and wasn't sure if either was correct.

If you want to be really fancy, you can say cauda – but that’s just Latin for tail.

If it is a particularly tailish tail, I would go with caudissima .

André

Q-tip

While the original poster's second post might have inspired someone to cite an anecdote concerning Abraham Lincoln, I think it's entirely reasonable to wonder if there wasn't some specific technical name for the stroke which distinguishes a Q from an O. Appendage, terminus, cauda, tail... or some other word, unique to the rarefied reaches of typography.

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 28 Apr 2015. original URL