page_title: Orthographic ligature
section_title: Stylistic ligatures
hierarchical_section_title: Orthographic ligature / Latin alphabet / Stylistic ligatures
caption_attribution_description: English: Demonstrates using ligature "Wh" and "Th" in handwriting font Taumfel
context_page_description: In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character æ as used in English, in which the letters a and e are joined. The common ampersand developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t were combined.
context_section_description: Many ligatures combine f with the following letter. A particularly prominent example is ﬁ (or f‌i, rendered with two normal letters). The tittle of the i in many typefaces collides with the hood of the f when placed beside each other in a word, and are combined into a single glyph with the tittle absorbed into the f. Other ligatures with the letter f include fj, f‌l (ﬂ), f‌f (ﬀ), f‌f‌i (ﬃ), and f‌f‌l (ﬄ). Ligatures for fa, fe, fo, fr, fs, ft, fb, fh, fu, fy, and for f followed by a full stop, comma, or hyphen, as well as the equivalent set for the doubled ff and fft are also used, though are less common.
  These arose because with the usual type sort for lowercase f, the end of its hood is on a kern, which would be damaged by collision with raised parts of the next letter.
  Ligatures crossing the morpheme boundary of a composite word are sometimes considered incorrect, especially in official German orthography as outlined in the Duden. An English example of this would be ff in shelf‌ful; a German example would be Schiff‌fahrt ("boat trip"). Some computer programs (such as TeX) provide a setting to disable ligatures for German, while some users have also written macros to identify which ligatures to disable.
  Turkish distinguishes dotted and dotless "I". In a ligature with f (in words such as fırın and fikir), this contrast would be obscured. The fi ligature is therefore not used in Turkish typography, and neither are other ligatures like that for fl, which would be rare anyway.
  Remnants of the ligatures ſʒ/ſz ("sharp s", eszett) and tʒ/tz ("sharp t", tezett) from Fraktur, a family of German blackletter typefaces, originally mandatory in Fraktur but now employed only stylistically, can be seen to this day on street signs for city squares whose name contains Platz or ends in -platz. Instead, the "sz" ligature has merged into a single character, the German ß – see below.
  Sometimes, ligatures for st (ﬆ), ſt (ﬅ), ch, ck, ct, Qu and Th are used (e.g. in the typeface Linux Libertine).
  Besides conventional ligatures, in the metal type era some newspapers commissioned custom condensed single sorts for the names of common long names that might appear in news headings, such as "Eisenhower", "Chamberlain", and others. In these cases the characters did not appear combined, just more tightly spaced than if printed conventionally.
caption: Ligatures "Th" and "Wh" illustration
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