Drew Ink The year

Grotesque

Also called Grotesk, Gothic

The first family of sans serifs: slightly uneven, a little squarish in the curves, with a bowl-and-tail lowercase g and a tendency to close up its apertures.

Grotesque: a page of a Berthold specimen showing Akzidenz-Grotesk, sold as Standard, in extended weights.
Akzidenz-Grotesk in a Berthold specimen, James Puckett, photograph. CC BY 2.0. Cropped to the first two showings. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
Grotesque: Grotesque No. 9 at 72 point on an Adcraft Typographers sheet, a heavy nineteenth-century English grotesque with a narrow, closed a and g.
Grotesque No. 9, Adcraft specimen, Stephenson Blake, Grotesque No. 9; the sheet by Adcraft Typographers; photographed by James Puckett. CC BY 2.0. Cropped to the capitals and lowercase. Retrieved 2026-09-10.

Near it

Neo-grotesqueGeometric sansHumanist sansApertureVox-ATypI

What it is made of

aperturesclosedthe terminals of the c and s curl in toward each other
curvesslightly squared
strokenear-uniform, with the small irregularities that later classes removed

Where it came from

The name is nineteenth-century British and was not a compliment; a letter with the serifs taken off looked grotesque. American foundries called the same thing gothic. Caslon's Two Lines English Egyptian of 1816 is generally cited as the first printed sans serif.

Done well

Sources