Is it possible to compare serif fonts and sans serif fonts in deeper meaning?
Serifs are thought to have originated in the Roman alphabet with inscriptional lettering—words carved into stone in Roman antiquity. The explanation proposed by Father Edward Catich in his 1968 book The Origin of the Serif is now broadly but not universally accepted: the Roman letter outlines were first brushed onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brush marks which flaired at stroke ends and corners, creating serifs. The origin of the word “serif” is obscure, but apparently almost as recent as the type style. The oldest citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are 1841 for “sans serif”, given as sanserif, and 1830 for “serif”. The OED speculates that “serif” was a back-formation from “sanserif”. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary traces “serif” to the Dutch schreef, meaning wrote, and ultimately through Dutch schrijven, German schreiben and Latin scribere, all meaning “to write”. Schreef now also means “serif” in Dutch.
