Descender

The descender is the portion of a lowercase letter that drops below the baseline, visible in letters like g, j, p, q, and y. Descender depth varies by typeface and affects the perceived density of a block of text. Fonts with deep descenders need more leading to prevent lines from crowding each other. When setting type at the same size, a font with deep descenders will have more white space above the x-height to compensate.

The common mistake with most typographic terms is applying them without considering how they interact with other settings. Type is a system: changing kerning affects tracking, changing size affects leading, changing measure affects line-height. Test changes in context rather than in isolation.

Descenders are the parts of letters that drop below the baseline, seen in g, j, p, q, and y. Their depth is built into the font's metrics, and it sets a practical floor for how tight line-height can go: if leading is too tight, descenders from one line collide with the ascenders of the line below, and text starts to look crowded.

The descender also matters at the edges of a layout. A paragraph clipped with overflow hidden can cut the tails of g and y, which is a common bug in fixed-height blocks. In all-caps UI, the capital Q has a long tail that is easy to miss when measuring a bounding box. If a component needs a fixed height, give it a few extra pixels of padding on the bottom so descenders are not cropped.