It is a sans-serif variant of the Lucida font family and supports Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew scripts, as well as all the characters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

It is the first Unicode encoded font to include non-Latin scripts (Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew).

It was designed by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow in 1993, and was first shipped with the Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 operating system.

A nearly identical font, called Lucida Grande, shipped as the default system font with Apple's Mac OS X operating system, until switching to Helvetica Neue in 2014 with OS X Yosemite; Lucida Grande added support for Arabic and Thai scripts.

The typeface has a flaw in the combining low line character (U+0332) and the combining double low line character (U+0333), which are rendered as a blank or as a simple tiny underline when font-size is less than 238 point or so in word processors.