descender

1 someone who descends

2 a lowercase letter that has a part extending below other lowercase letters

3 (printing) the part of lowercase letters that extends below the other lowercase letters

English

Noun

descender (Plural: descenders)

1. A person or thing that descends.
2. The part of a lowercase letter that is drawn below the bottom of lowercase letters, such as the tail of the letters g, p, and q.

Spanish

Verb

1. to descend.

Conjugation

Related terms

• descendiente
• descendente
• descendencia
• descenso

thumb|390px|The descenders are the parts of the characters that lie below the baseline.In typography, a descender is the portion of a letter in a Latin-derived alphabet that extends below the baseline of a font. For example, in the letter y, the descender would be the "tail," or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the v created by the two lines converging.

In most fonts, descenders are reserved for lowercase characters such as g, p, and y. Some fonts, however, also use descenders for some numerals (typically 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9). Such numerals are called old-style numerals. (Some italic fonts, such as Computer Modern italic, put a descender on the numeral 4 but not on any other numerals. Such fonts are not considered old-style.) Some fonts also use descenders for the tails on a few uppercase letters such as J and Q.

The parts of characters that extend above the x-height of a font are called ascenders.