---
name: Swash
slug: swash
category: typography
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A letter drawn with an ornamental flourish, usually an extended
  entry or exit stroke on an italic capital.
aliases:
  - name: swash caps
  - name: swsh
    source: opentype
  - name: flourish
tags:
  - fonts
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - stylistic-set
    - contextual-alternates
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: OpenType features (Typofonderie)
    url: https://typofonderie.com/help/opentype-features
  - title: A Glossary of Typographic Terms (Monotype)
    url: https://www.monotype.com/resources/typographic-terms
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: naming the decorative tail on a fancy capital
---

A swash is an alternate drawing of a letter with a stroke run out past where the
letter needs it: the tail of a Q swung out under the next word, the leg of an R
or a K carried away to the right, an entry stroke curling in from the left of a
capital. The shapes come from chancery italic, where a pen leaving the paper at
speed produced exactly these exits, and they belong to italic capitals more than
to anything else. A swash is not a different letter and not decoration laid on
top of one. It is the same [glyph](/glyph) redrawn, which is why substituting it
changes the fit of the line as well as its texture.

Getting one is a font question before it is a CSS question. Swash forms live in
the font file under the `swsh` feature (with `cswh` for the contextual case),
reached from CSS with `font-variant-alternates: swash(…)` or by setting the tag
directly. Ask a face that carries no swash table and nothing happens at all: the
text renders in the ordinary forms with no warning, which is the standing trap
of [OpenType features](/opentype-features) generally. It is the same machinery
that gives you a [ligature](/ligature) and [small caps](/small-caps), doing a
different job in each case: a ligature fuses colliding letters into one drawing,
small caps supply short capitals with the weight of lowercase, and a swash
supplies a more elaborate drawing of a letter that already fit.

The rules of use are old and still hold. A swash capital is for an initial, a
final, or a single display word, not for a run of text, because the flourishes
were drawn to have empty space to travel through and a line of them collide with
each other. Never set a whole word in swash capitals; the classic advice is
blunter still, that swash caps are never used with other capitals at all.
Contextual swash exists precisely to enforce this, swapping the ornate form only
where the position in the word allows it. The register they carry is festive and
old, which is why they turn up in wedding stationery, wine labels, and the
letterforms of [Art Nouveau](/art-nouveau), and why they read as costume
anywhere else.

One note about the specimen on this page. None of the faces this site loads
carries a swash table, and a screenshot of a feature silently failing would
teach the wrong thing, so the letters there are drawn as vector paths rather
than set in a typeface. The construction is honest about what a swash is, an
exit stroke extended, but the drawing is this site's and not a foundry's.