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An underline is one or more horizontal lines immediately below a portion of text. Single, and occasionally double, underlining was originally used in hand-written or typewritten documents to emphasise text. In a manuscript to be typeset, various forms of underlining were conventionally used to indicate that text should be set in a special typeface such as italics to show emphasis, part of a procedure known as markup. With the advent of word processing, different typefaces can be used in the manuscript directly, so that underlining is no longer needed for markup; but underlining is sometimes used in documents in its own right.
Underlines are sometimes used as a diacritic, to indicate that a letter has a different pronunciation to its non-underlined form.
Use with computers
In web browsers, default settings typically distinguish hyperlinks by underlining them (and usually changing their color), but both users and websites can change these settings to make some or all hyperlinks appear differently (or even without distinction from normal text).
In HTML and Wikipedia formatting, text can be underlined by wrapping it with the underline tag, for example,
In plain-text computer files, including e-mail communication, where underlining is not possible, it is often indicated by surrounding words with underscore characters. For example, "You must use an _emulsion_ paint on the ceiling".
Underlines in foreign languages
In Chinese, the underline is a punctuation mark for proper names (專名號, 专名号; pinyin: zhuānmínghào; literally “proper name mark”, used for personal and geographic names). Its meaning is somewhat akin to capitalization in English and should never be used for emphasis; however, due to the influence of English computing, the underline is now sometimes used for emphasis. A wavy underline (書名號, 书名号; pinyin: shūmínghào; literally “book title mark”) serves a similar function, but marks names of literary works instead of proper names.
Manuscripts
The following kinds of underlines are used on manuscripts to indicate special typefaces to be used.
- single underline for italic type
- double underline for small caps
- triple underline for full capital letters (used among small caps or to change text already typed as lower case)
- wavy underline for boldface
See also
"Underline"