Italic type

Italic type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right used to distinguish or otherwise set off certains words within text.

An example of italic text.

Italics are used for:

• Emphasis.
• The titles of works that stand by themselves, such as books or newspapers. Works that appear within larger works, such as short stories or newspaper articles, are not italicized, but merely set off in quotation marks.
• The names of ships.
• Foreign words.
• Words used as words.

If something within a run of italics needs to be italicized itself (for example, the name of a ship within a sentence already italicized for emphasis), the type is switched back to non-italicized ("Roman") type.

Italic type can be produced in HTML by use of the <i> and <em> tags (the former tag has been deprecated in more recent version of HTML and completely removed from XHTML in favor of the latter). Italic is achieved in CSS by use of font-style: italic.

In media where italicization is not possible (such as a typewriter), underlining is typically used instead.