black letter

plural black letters · alternative blackletter · alternative black-letter

1. A highly calligraphic Western European script style used from approximately 1150.
   1. countableuncountableartsA Northern European style of type based on the script, with contrasting thick-and-thin, angular strokes forming upright letterforms, and usually set with a dark typographic colour on the page.

      Also we discovered what is still more curious, an English version of the black-letter Latin.

      1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC

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      The original boldface printing types are the blackletters used by Gutenberg in the 1440s. For the next two centuries, blackletter fonts were widely used not only in Germany but in France, Spain, the Netherlands and England.

      2002, Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (version 2.5), Vancouver: Hartley & Marks, →ISBN, page 103

      Synonyms: Gothic

   2. countableuncountableartsText set in black-letter type.
2. countableuncountablelawThe basic standard elements for a particular field of law, which are generally known and free from doubt or dispute.

   It's black letter law, Your Honor, as black as it gets. Out-of-court statements used to support the truth of the facts stated are hearsay.

   1995 November 1, Rene Balcer, Jeremy R. Littman, “Jeopardy” (23:51 from the start), in Law & Order, season 6, episode 4, spoken by Defense Attorney Professor Norman Rothenberg (Jeffrey DeMunn)

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   [The US Supreme Court] did not raise the fundamental normative question of the patent-ability of genes. Instead, it took a black letter approach to interpreting the Patent Act, which had first been enacted in 1790, and which in its current form states that “whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.”

   2020, Katharina Pistor, “5: Enclosing Nature's Code”, in The Code of Capital […] , Princeton University Press, →ISBN