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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

font.

A receptacle in a church for holy water, especially one used in baptism.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/fɒnt/Received-Pronunciation/fɑnt/General-American
  1. A receptacle in a church for holy water, especially one used in baptism.

    She dipped her fingers in the font and crossed herself.
  2. A receptacle for lamp oil in a lamp.

Where this word comes from

From Old English font, an early borrowing from Latin fōns, fontis (“fountain”).

noun/fɒnt/Received-Pronunciation/fɑnt/General-American
  1. A set of glyphs of unified design, belonging to one typeface (e.g., Helvetica), style (e.g., italic), and weight (e.g., bold). Usually representing the letters of an alphabet and its supplementary characters. In metal typesetting, a set of type sorts in one size.

  2. A set of glyphs of unified design, belonging to one typeface (e.g., Helvetica), style (e.g., italic), and weight (e.g., bold). Usually representing the letters of an alphabet and its supplementary characters. In phototypesetting, a set of patterns forming glyphs of any size, or the film they are stored on.

  3. A set of glyphs of unified design, belonging to one typeface (e.g., Helvetica), style (e.g., italic), and weight (e.g., bold). Usually representing the letters of an alphabet and its supplementary characters. In digital typesetting, a set of glyphs in a single style, representing one or more alphabets or writing systems, or the computer code representing it.

  4. A typeface.

    informal
  5. A computer file containing the code used to draw and compose the glyphs of one or more typographic fonts on a computer display or printer.

    metonymically
    They bought a license for the Gulliver font and installed that font on several machines.
  6. The design of any text.

    informal
    I like the font of this logo.
Where this word comes from

From Middle French fonte (“act or process of founding or melting; act of producing items from molten metal; cast iron; set of type”) (modern French fonte), either: * from fondre (“to melt, melt down; to smelt”), from Old French fondre, from Latin fundere, the present active infinitive of fundō (“to pour out; to make by smelting, found”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰewd- (“to pour”); or * from Late Latin *fundita, a noun use of funditus, a perfect passive participle form of Latin fundō (see above; the classical Latin form is fūsus).

verb/fɒnt/Received-Pronunciation/fɑnt/General-American
  1. To overlay (text) on the picture.

    informal · transitive
Where this word comes from

From Middle French fonte (“act or process of founding or melting; act of producing items from molten metal; cast iron; set of type”) (modern French fonte), either: * from fondre (“to melt, melt down; to smelt”), from Old French fondre, from Latin fundere, the present active infinitive of fundō (“to pour out; to make by smelting, found”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰewd- (“to pour”); or * from Late Latin *fundita, a noun use of funditus, a perfect passive participle form of Latin fundō (see above; the classical Latin form is fūsus).

noun/fɒnt/Received-Pronunciation/fɑnt/General-American
  1. A source, wellspring, fount.

    figuratively
Where this word comes from

Apparently from fount, with influence from the senses above (under etymology 1).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.