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In typography, serifs are the small lines that are attached to the ends of certain letters. A sans-serif typeface is one that doesn’t include these lines.

Typefaces that have serifs are called serifs; typefaces that don’t are called sans-serifs (which means “without serif” in French).

Examples of sans-serif typefaces include Helvetica, Futura, and Gotham.

Before the advent of the term “sans-serif”, there were a variety of words to describe fonts without serifs. You still see some of these in the names of some typefaces. Two examples are “grotesque” (or grotesk in German), as in Akzidenz Grotesk, and “gothic”, as in Franklin Gothic.