The Story of an Underscore

Underscores ( _ ), also called underlines, have traditionally been used to draw emphasis on a piece of text.

Remember school days when you would draw a line under handwritten text to make it stand out or mark it as important?

The same concept was carried forward when typewriters came into existence.

Back then, the only way to emphasize text was to type the word, move the typewriter carriage back to the beginning of the word, and overtype the word with the underscore character. Phew! So much effort was involved in doing what seems like a trivial thing now. Thanks to our generation, we have text editors and underlining has been majorly overtaken by italic, bold, and small caps typeface.

For example:

With underscore: The daily catch up call is at 1̲1̲:̲0̲0̲ ̲A̲M̲. Don’t miss attending it!

Without underscore: The daily catch up call is at 11:00 AM. Don’t miss attending it!

Originally devised to create emphasis, today, the character is also used to create visual spacing in a sequence of words where whitespace is not permitted. For instance, it is majorly used in file names, email addresses, URLs, and many programming languages.

Additionally, web pages mostly use underlining to indicate a link. So, it is a good practice to not use underscore on web pages.

Hmm, who would have thought that a tiny line we call the underscore could be put to use in so many different ways.

Speaking of English grammar, do you ever wonder “Does grammar matter?” Check this short video by TED-Ed that sheds light on the need for consistent patterns for any language to function beyond the geographical boundaries by people across the world.

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