Notch: from woodcut to phone camera

To most people, a notch is a simple V-shaped cut or indentation: a nick in a tree trunk, a groove for an arrow nock, a mark on a tally stick. It comes from the Middle English and Old French, a straightforward cut made to hold or measure something. The word survives in everyday use wherever two things meet and lock: a buckle notch, a belt notch, the notches on a ratchet.

In industrial electronics, the notch is a deliberate recess cut into the very top edge of a smartphone or tablet screen. This small black or dark area interrupts the display and houses the front-facing camera, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, and speaker. The notch emerged as a design compromise: manufacturers wanted screens that stretched almost edge to edge, but the camera and sensors still needed somewhere to live. Rather than shrink the display or add a thick bezel, designers cut a notch into the screen itself. On an iPhone or Android flagship, this notch is roughly pill-shaped or teardrop-shaped and sits centered above the main display area.

The notch represents a collision between two design pressures. The screen size and resolution keep rising, because consumers want more usable display area. Yet the camera and face recognition hardware have to go somewhere. A notch allows both: the display fills nearly the entire front surface, but OS and apps learn to work around the obstruction at the top. Developers position status icons, notifications, and controls in the safe area below the notch, leaving the notched region to show a black bar or to become part of the interface itself.

The woodworking term notchboard shows how the concept persists across trades. In staircase construction, the notchboard (or stringer) is the angled board that runs along the side of the steps and receives the cut-out ends of each step. The step ends fit into notches routed into the board, holding them in place. In both the phone and the staircase, the notch is a recessed pocket designed to receive and hold another component, maximizing the use of space while keeping the overall structure compact and functional.