kern
/kɝn/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.16 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A doll or figurine raised in celebration of a successful harvest; kern-baby.
Countable; Obsolete; Uncountable
verb
To adjust the horizontal space between selected pairs of letters (characters or glyphs); to perform such adjustments to a portion of text, according to preset rules.
Example Sentences
- "A few types have a portion of the face letter projecting over the body, as in the letter f ; this projection is called the kern, and in combination with other letters the projecting part generally extends over the next letter, as in fe. In those combinations, wherein the kern would come in contact with another letter, compound types are cast, as in the case of ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl."
- "If you need to kern anything beyond the most commonly used pairs, you can use applications software such as Adobe PageMaker to customize pairs."
- "Especially consider kerning if you are printing on a relatively high-resolution printer, such as a 600-dpi (dots per inch) laser printer."
- "Remember, the goal of kerning is to make letter pairs look natural, not necessarily to minimize letterspaces."
- "You should kern letter pairs when spacing between characters is too wide or too narrow."
- "O then belike she was old and gentle; and you rode like a kern of Ireland, your French hose off and in your strait strossers."
Etymology
From Middle English curn, cooren, variant forms of Middle English corn, see English corn and also Dutch kern, Old High German kerno, cherno, Middle High German kerne, kern, German Kern (“core, kernel”), Old Norse kjarni, Icelandic kjarni, Danish kjerne, Swedish kärna (“core, kernel”); see also kernel.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /kɝn/
- British English: /kɜːn/
Usage
- Countable
- Obsolete
- Uncountable
- Archaic
- British usage