Ever wonder where fonts came from, how they got their name and how many there are? Here are some Fascinating Font Facts.

Way back when there was metal typesetting a font was a particular size, weight and style of a typeface.

In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, “font” is frequently synonymous with “typeface”. Each style is in a separate “font file”—for instance, the typeface “Bulmer” may include the fonts “Bulmer roman”, “Bulmer italic”, “Bulmer bold” and “Bulmer extended”—but the term “font” might be applied either to one of these alone or to the whole typeface.

So how many fonts are there?

Well nobody knows for sure, and it depends on how you count. As a ballpark number, there are perhaps 300,000 fonts in the world. That’s counting individual fonts, not families.

Which font has the most impact?

In 2012 an experiment was run, on readers of the New York Times. Errol Morris feigned a survey to see if readers responded differently to different fonts. He discovered that a certain font, Baskerville- specifically, was perceived as more believable by readers.