letter of credit: see credit, letter of.

letter: see alphabet.

credit, letter of, commercial instrument through which a bank or other financial institution instructs a correspondent institution to advance a specified sum of money to the bearer. The document is called a circular letter of credit when it is not addressed to any particular correspondent. In effect, a letter of credit is a draft, save that the amount is merely stated as a maximum not to be exceeded. Letters of credit, mainly used by travelers, greatly simplify nonlocal business transactions. Those who issue such letters are usually so well known that any bank will honor the letter upon proper identification. Travelers' checks are a modified form of a letter of credit. They are issued in coupons, upon whose face a value is usually expressed in terms of the currency of a particular country. In the United States they are issued by express companies and banks. Circular letters of credit require that each payment, as it is made, be endorsed by the firm making payment so that other banks may know how much of the total credit has been used.

black letter: see type.

Greek-letter society: see fraternity.

Uppercase, capital, or large letter in calligraphy, in contrast to the minuscule, lowercase, or small letter. All the letters in a majuscule script are contained between a single pair of real or theoretical horizontal lines. The earliest known Roman majuscule letters are in the style known as square capitals, distinguished by downstrokes that are heavier than upstrokes and by serifs (short strokes at right angles to the top and bottom of a letter). Square capitals were used mainly in inscriptions on Roman imperial monuments. Rustic capitals, used in books and official documents, formed a freer, more elliptical script. Roman cursive capitals, a running-hand script used for notes and letters, were a forerunner of the minuscule scripts that appeared later.

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Lowercase letters in calligraphy, in contrast to majuscule, or uppercase letters. Unlike majuscules, minuscules are not fully contained between two real or hypothetical lines; their stems can go above or below the line. Developed by Alcuin in the 8th century, it allowed the division of writing into sentences and paragraphs by beginning sentences with capital letters and ending them with periods. The script was originally rounded, but gradually the strokes became heavier until it became what is now known as Gothic or black letter script.

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or Gothic script or Old English script

Style of alphabet used in handwriting throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. It features uniform vertical strokes that end on the baseline, angular lines instead of smooth curves and circles, and the overlapping of convex forms. Black letter and roman were the dominant letter shapes of medieval typography. The only extant work known to have been printed by Johannes Gutenberg, the 42-line Bible (1450s), was set in black-letter type. Roman type largely superseded it in the Renaissance, though black letter persisted in Germany well into the 20th century. Today black letter is often used for diplomas, Christmas cards, and liturgical writings.

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