Italic
Italic is a style of font that slants the letters evenly to the right. For example, this sentence is italicized. When a font is installed on a computer, there usually is an italic version. For example, with Verdana font, there is a "Verdana Regular," "Verdana Bold," "Verdana Bold Italic," and "Verdana Italic" font. If the font does not have an italic version, you may have to use an oblique version to achieve the same effect.
Although sometimes used interchangeably, oblique fonts take the existing letterforms and slant them, while italic fonts have letterforms designed specifically to look better when slanted.
When should I italicize text?
As with many things in English, the rules of when to italicize text vary depending on the style guide you follow. Below are some general rules that most style guides follow when italicizing text.
Some style guides may prefer to use an underline instead of italic for the following rules. When writing anything shown online, we prefer to use italic because most people assume anything underlined is a hyperlink.
- Use italics when emphasizing a word or phrase in a sentence.
- When writing about the title of an album, book, magazine, movie, newspaper, podcast, speech, TV show, or work of art.
- Italicize a word or phrase that is in a different language.
Creating italicized text in a word processor such as Microsoft Word
- Highlight the text you want to be italic.
- Click the I button, often between the "B" and "U" for bold and underline, as shown in the following picture.
The keyboard shortcut to make text italic is Ctrl+I on the PC and Chromebook or Command+I on the Mac. To make text italic using a keyboard shortcut, highlight the text and press the keyboard shortcut.
How to disable or remove italic
To disable or turn off the italic feature, perform the same steps you used to enable italic. For example, if you used the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+I to enable italic, press it again to turn it off. To un-italicize text, highlight the italic text and then use the keyboard shortcut or click the italic button.
Create italic text in HTML
To italicize text on a website, blog, or other HTML (hypertext markup language) documents, surround the text with the <i> tag as shown below.
<i>This text should be in italics</i>
To italicize a heading, paragraph, or other text groups for style reasons, it is better to use CSS (cascading style sheets) to make the text italic.
How to italic text in CSS
To italicize text in CSS, you can use any of the following examples. In the first example, we are surrounding the text we want to be italic with a span tag and then add a style to that tag.
<span style="font-style:italic">Italic</span>
This method italicizes specific text that doesn't have an associated CSS class. For text like a heading that always needs to be italic, you can add a CSS rule for the specific HTML tag. For example, if we always want our H2 headings to be italic, we could add the following rule to our CSS code or CSS file.
h2 {
font-style:italic;
}
Once this CSS code is added, any page containing this code or points to the CSS file with this code has italic H2 headings.
Finally, a CSS class could be added to your CSS code or CSS file to apply italic to anything with that text. For example, we could add the following class called "ital" to italicize text.
.ital {
font-style:italic;
}
Once this text is added, we can add that class to any HTML tag. For example, adding the class to a paragraph (as shown below), would make the entire paragraph italicized.
<p class="ital">This paragraph of text would be italicized.</p>
BIU, Bold, Ctrl+I, Font, <i>, Oblique, Regular, Slant, Text effects, Typography terms, Underline, Word processor terms