Initial

In a written or published work, an initial[a] is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text.

The classical tradition was slow to use capital letters for initials at all; in surviving Roman texts it often is difficult even to separate the words as spacing was not used either.

In late antiquity (c. 4th–6th century) both came into common use in Italy, the initials usually were set in the left margin (as in the second example below), as though to cut them off from the rest of the text, and about twice as tall as the other letters.

In the very early history of printing, the typesetters would leave blank the necessary space, so that the initials could be added later by a scribe or miniature painter.

Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.Alternatively, the initial may be in the left margin, with the text indented, as shown here.

Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.In some older manuscripts, the first letter of normal sized text after a drop cap also would be capitalized, as may be seen in the Mainz Psalter above, and in the original 1609 printing of Shakespeare's sonnets.

[citation needed] There is no accepted solution for how to handle initials if there is an opening quotation mark before the first letter.

The Chicago Manual of Style offers two options: leave out the opening quotation mark entirely; or have it be the same size as the initial, as shown below.

Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.An inhabited initial is an initial, an enlarged letter at the beginning of a paragraph or other section of text that contains an illustration of human or animal figures within the letter.

They would also provide a visual point of reference, "marking the division of the text into books, chapters, paragraphs and sometimes even verses" since, due to the cost of parchment, the modern convention that a new section will begin on a new page had not emerged.

Manuscripts meant for everyday use, typically by friars or university students, often had little illumination, and hardly any elaborate historiated initials or flourishes.