<p class="onum"><i class="dropcap Jozef-Capitals">S</i>erifs originated from the first official Greek writings on stone and in Latin alphabet with inscriptional lettering—words carved into stone in Roman antiquity. The explanation proposed by Father Edward Catich in his 1968 book <i class="Jozef-Regular-Italic">The Origin of the Serif</i> is now broadly but not universally accepted: the Roman letter outlines were first painted onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brush marks, which flared at stroke ends and corners, creating serifs. Another theory is that serifs were devised to neaten the ends of lines as they were chiselled into stone.</p> <p class="onum"><i class="dropcap Jozef-Capitals">T</i>he origin of the word ‘serif’ is obscure, but apparently is almost as recent as the type style. The book <i class="Jozef-Regular-Italic">The British Standard of the Capital Letters contained in the Roman Alphabet, forming a complete code of systematic rules for a mathematical construction and accurate formation of the same</i> (1813) by William Hollins, defined ‘surripses’, usually pronounced ‘surriphs’, as “projections which appear at the tops and bottoms of some letters, the O and Q excepted, at the beginning or end, and sometimes at each, of all”.</p>