agate

In metal type, agate was a fixed body size of 5.5 points, sitting between pearl (5 point) and nonpareil (6 point) in the traditional hierarchy of small types. It was used primarily for footnotes, classified advertisements, and other text that needed to be compact but still readable without magnification. The name comes from the agate stone, thought to resemble the small, dense character of the type itself, though the etymology is not certain.

Agate was never as common as nonpareil or pearl in English printing. American foundries adopted it more readily than British ones, and it appears most often in period job printing specimens from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike the more standard sizes, agate was inconsistently cast across different founders, making it difficult to mix sorts from different sources without visible gaps or alignment problems.

Use in classified advertising

The type found its widest use in newspaper classified sections, where advertisers paid by the line. Because agate was narrower than nonpareil, more words fit per line, allowing publishers to charge less per ad while maintaining column density. Measurement systems for classified space were often quoted in agate lines, a unit that persisted in newspaper work well into the digital era, even after the type itself was abandoned.

By the 1970s, agate had become obsolete in working print shops. Offset lithography and phototypesetting made the fixed metal sizes irrelevant, and digital systems allowed any point size to be set without foundry constraints. The term survives today mainly in typography history and in the occasional legacy document or specification.