Letterspacing

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. The gap added between individual characters of printed or displayed text to change its appearance ; the act of inserting extra room between letters to improve readability or style
2. Extra space placed between the characters of a word or line of type, used to alter how text looks ; the practice of widening the gaps between letters in a typeface
3. The distance set between adjacent letters in a font or passage ; the deliberate widening of intervals between characters for visual effect

Etymology: "Letterspacing" is a compound of "letter" and "spacing": the printer's practice of inserting small gaps between the individual characters of a line of type. "Letter" comes from Latin "littera," which in English referred to a single character of the alphabet, and "spacing" is the noun formed from "space," used here for the blank room left between characters. The compound describes a technique rather than a word with a shifting meaning, so its history is largely that of its parts. Type was once set by hand, one piece of metal per character, and compositors adjusted the gaps between those pieces to make a line look even or to make capital letters and small caps easier to read. The term follows that craft into modern digital typesetting, where the same adjustment is made by software.

Synonyms: tracking