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For example, the letters in the lowercase word "narc" align perfectly and therefore make the word appear 'flat'. On the other hand, the letters in the word "blue" or "bed" do not align and therefore causes the word to appear more 'jutted'.

Is there a word for what I have just described? Maybe a literary or linguistic term?

Filip
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    An ascender is a letter with strokes above the x-height (see Nuclear Hoagie's answer), and a descender hangs below. I don't think there's any term for a non-ascending and non-descending character, or a word comprising such animals. – jimm101 Mar 19 '24 at 14:15
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    Surprisingly, this does not apply solely to words alone but also to numbers as well: demo1, demo2, demo3! That’s because this same thing happens with the lowercase digits (called mixed-height text figures rather than all-caps lining figures), where 012 are all at x-height but 34579 have descenders and 68 have ascenders. This lets 01234567890 read more easily in running body text because there’s now contrast for the eye, just like reading lowercase letters. – tchrist Mar 19 '24 at 16:12
  • block letters can all have the same height. Other typefaces do not. And no, there is no literary term for this. Why would there be – Lambie Mar 19 '24 at 16:26
  • a race on anon: cram a case – Tinfoil Hat Mar 20 '24 at 02:22
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    It reminds me… I always wondered what the longest “flat” word was, in English as well as in my native language, French. – Pierre Paquette Mar 20 '24 at 02:23
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    This is known as the prisoner's constraint. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo – Xavier Mar 20 '24 at 06:08
  • If there's a word for this, it's probably technical jargon in the graphic design industry. So you might do better asking in [graphicdesign.se]. – Barmar Mar 20 '24 at 14:45
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    @Xavier That, sir, is the answer. Please make it so. – tchrist Mar 20 '24 at 22:26
  • Oulipo is a French literary movement, known for lots of math-y type games, not for typeface. – Lambie Mar 21 '24 at 14:55
  • So, a word made only out of the letters aceimnorsuvwxz (or does the dot on the i disqualify it)? – Dan Mar 21 '24 at 15:52
  • @tchrist I was thinking that numbers without ascenders and descenders would be a good entry on the OEIS, but since it's just 0, 1 and 2, it would be exactly the same as just "ternary numbers". – Darrel Hoffman Mar 21 '24 at 23:26
  • Motivating example: 'ass' is a 'flat' word... :-" – smci Mar 22 '24 at 00:21
  • The longest such words seem to be enormousness and excrescences – James K Mar 22 '24 at 18:30
  • Even longer at 13 letters: "vancouverense" as in cirsium x vancouverense - a species of fish. – Jiminy Cricket. Mar 22 '24 at 20:04
  • Can you say whether this is really about a 'literary' term or perhaps about technical terms used in typography? – Robbie Goodwin Mar 24 '24 at 22:46

4 Answers4

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UCDA gives the technical term (from typography) for single letters like that:

The lowercase letters, which, like the x, have no ascenders or descenders, are known as the primary letters.

Example in use:

The real key to vertical spacing of headlines is the baseline or bottom of the primary letters. —Slinging Ink

From there, you have a lot of phrases possible, like "word made of primary letters".

Laurel
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    The letter "i" makes this not-quite-perfect. It has no ascender or descender and is a primary letter, but the tittle is placed above the mean line, making "i" taller than any other primary letter - a primary letter word containing "i" is not completely "flat". – Nuclear Hoagie Mar 19 '24 at 17:41
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    @NuclearHoagie Remarkably, even letters that don't have ascenders or descenders are not the same size. So like wroz aren't exactly all topping off at the nominal x-height because of the need for the optical illusion explained at the start of the linked YouTube video. – tchrist Mar 19 '24 at 20:04
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    @tchrist Just for fun, zoomed in on wroz, took a screenshot on Windows, and opened it in Paint. Although there is some really minor anti aliasing going on the round part of the r and o, with the font used for a code block on SE the height really is the same. Not disagreeing with your general point though. – David Mulder Mar 20 '24 at 01:03
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    Hm, I would need some more and better sources to buy this, and I’m not finding any. – Tinfoil Hat Mar 20 '24 at 01:21
  • @tchrist Right, but even when nominal x-height characters are rounded off above the mean line, it's done to make the result look flat, even if it isn't. "wroz" may not have identical-height characters in all fonts, but it should appear that way. – Nuclear Hoagie Mar 20 '24 at 12:21
  • Please provide more than one independent source to justify the claim that "primary letters" is "the technical term" in typography for the set of letters without ascenders. – TimR Mar 20 '24 at 22:32
  • @NuclearHoagie That would be font dependent, no? – Acccumulation Mar 21 '24 at 00:01
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    "word without ascenders/descenders" is way clearer than "word made of primary letters" – Level River St Mar 21 '24 at 00:31
  • @TimR Googling it, you can also find it on dictionary.com, the Collins dictionary, and wordreference.com. – JoL Mar 21 '24 at 00:46
  • @Jol: I am "old school" and would like to see some attestations "in the wild". – TimR Mar 21 '24 at 13:42
  • There is no word for letters, including those with ascenders and descenders that means "flat" when spelled out in lower case. – Lambie Mar 21 '24 at 14:58
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You may want to look into the feature known as word shape in psycholinguistics. Your example, narc, is composed entirely of "neutral" characters, giving it what you call its "flat" appearance, A word's appearance can be analyzed as a pattern or as an envelope.

Model #1: Word Shape

The word recognition model that says words are recognized as complete units is the oldest model in the psychological literature, and is likely much older than the psychological literature. The general idea is that we see words as a complete patterns rather than the sum of letter parts. Some claim that the information used to recognize a word is the pattern of ascending, descending, and neutral characters. Another formulation is to use the envelope created by the outline of the word. The word patterns are recognizable to us as an image because we have seen each of the patterns many times before. James Cattell (1886) was the first psychologist to propose this as a model of word recognition. Cattell is recognized as an influential founder of the field of psycholinguistics, which includes the scientific study of reading.

Figures Microsoft; "The Science of Word Recognition" (2022)

By this analysis, words like narc and none have basically the same word envelope. (Just this morning, I twice misread "see two take one" as "sec two take one" in a rulebook. I couldn't figure out what a "take" was in a section (sec.) of text. When I reread, I realized it was "see" and not "sec", and the intended meaning was a reference to a previously mentioned "draw and look at two [cards], take one, [and put the other back].")

I believe we use both envelopes and patterns when we read. What is truly fascinating is that although writing evolved to record speech, stories and knowledge, our remarkable brains let us read (silently) many times faster than we can speak by bypassing pronunciation entirely.

DjinTonic
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    Reminds me of a poem I saw years ago that began "In dream, at the confluence of the said and the unsaid / a landscape of word-shape and letter-curve astonishes the dead". – TimR Mar 20 '24 at 22:35
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The typographical term for the height of a lowercase letter is the "x-height" - it extends from what is called the baseline (the bottom of most letters) to the mean line (the top of most lowercase letters). Parts of letters that extend above the mean line (as in "b") or below the baseline (as in "j") are called ascenders and descenders, respectively.

You could perhaps call a word that fits entirely within the x-height an "x-height word", although it's a rather particular term that may not be widely understood without technical knowledge of typography.

Nuclear Hoagie
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As @Xavier pointed out in a comment, such a word satisfies the prisoner's constraint:

Prisoner's constraint, also called Macao constraint

A type of lipogram that omits letters with ascenders and descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, and y).

But since your audience is likely to be unfamiliar with Oulipo, just using the definition “lipogram that omits letters with ascenders and descenders” would be more clear.

This allows the letters aceimnorsuvwxz (if you don't count i's dot as an “ascendar”).

According to a spellcheck dictionary on my PC, the longest English words that satisfy this constraint are the 19-letter “semiconsciousnesses” and “unceremoniousnesses”. If i is omitted, then the longest qualifying word is the 16-letter “curvaceousnesses”.

So, if you like self-demonstrating terms like “aibohphobia” (fear of palindromes), you could coin a term like semiconscious word or curvaceous word for the concept. Of course, since this is a new coinage, you'll need to define it upon its introduction.

Dan
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