Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A style of black letter formerly used in German manuscripts and printing.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun typography A style of black letter type, used especially in Germany in the 16th to 20th centuries.
  • noun US A Pennsylvania German document style, incorporating watercolour illustration and fraktur lettering.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[German, from Latin frāctūra, a breaking (from the curlicues that appear to break up the word); see fracture.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

1886 fractur, 1904 fraktur, from German Fraktur, from Latin frāctūra ("breaking n.") < frangere ("to break"), past participle fractus. Compare fracture, fraction.

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Examples

  • In Northern Europe, Germany and Britain, printing was first developed with the gothic fraktur style of lettering.

    A Passion « We Don't Count Your Own Visits To Your Blog 2006

  • Once choked on a pretzel while attempting to decipher an 18th-century Pennsylvania Dutch fraktur.

    Top Ten Signs President Bush is a Genealogist 2006

  • Pennsylvania has long been a hotbed for Americana collectors, between Amish quilts, fraktur and all that Pennsylvania German painted furniture.

    10 Collectibles That Blew Away Estimates 2006

  • You may notice that some characters are missing (such as capital N fraktur style).

    Planet Ubuntu 2010

  • You can type in those math characters using Insert → Special Character … in OpenOffice. org as shown below. mathematical alphanumeric symbols (fraktur style) in Plane 1.

    Planet Ubuntu 2010

  • Then if you held down the Option key, typed 1D40F and released the Option key, you'd see a math fraktur F.

    Site Home MurrayS 2010

  • PC Word's alt+x Unicode input method is more flexible since it allows you to edit the code, insert higher-plane characters like math italic and fraktur and do the inverse: replace a character by its

    Site Home MurrayS 2010

  • Features performances by Ephrata Cloister Chorus at 2, 3 and 4 p.m., plus book signing by fraktur artist Ruthanne Hartung and display by potter Christine Tosten-Souders from 1 to 4 p.m.

    Berks county news 2008

  • Kathy Lloyd: In this note we compute Leibniz algebra deformations of the three-dimensional Heisenberg Lie algebra [fraktur n] and compare it to its Lie deformations.

    Feeds4all documents in category 'SEO' 2008

  • (mathscr), fraktur (mathfrak) and blackboard (mathbb) fonts, and implemented the translation to Unicode chars: ℱ,,.

    US Market Commentary from Seeking Alpha 2009

Comments

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  • FrakturWeb: 'Fraktur is a folk art form practiced by Pennsylvania Germans principally from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The name derives from that of a distinctive German script marked by "fractured" pen strokes and the form has clear roots in European folk culture.'

    January 10, 2009

  • Ah, we know it well in these parts. :-) Also see black letter.

    January 11, 2009