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Every trade has its own talk -- and, as with any language, printers' jargon can have dialectic differences. But just as most Americans can generally understand regional dialects and accents, printers and journalists from various newspapers generally understand these terms:

They only sound like insults

Dingbat: An ornamental design, originally cast in lead, used at the end of a paragraph, page or chapter. Today, some newsrooms use the term to mean the identifying artwork and headline for a specific column. These identifying designs are also called column logos, or "sigs" -- short for signature because they're used for a specific column.

Tabloid: Half the size of a regular page -- although the term has come to mean gossipy reports of questionable taste.

Printers' language

Bleed: When type, a photograph or artwork prints into the outer margins of a page, appearing to run off the paper.

Bullet: A dot or square placed at the start of a sentence or paragraph of text.

Leading: The space between lines of type.

Head: Short for headline. Similar to a title, the role of the main headline is to describe the story in a handful of words.

Body: The printed story itself; excludes the headline and photos.

Leg: A story's individual column of type. A story that is displayed over three columns has three legs of type.

Widow: A single, partial line of type at the bottom of a column or page or a single word on a line.

Other terms of note

Case: Partitioned trays that held printers' letters for type. The cases were stacked: Capital letters were in the top, and small letters were kept in the bottom. Hence the terms "upper case" for capital letters and "lower case" for small ones.

Double truck: A layout spread across two facing pages. In earlier days, two type carts -- called trucks -- were required to move it.

-30- : Denotes the end of a story. Among the theories: The number of words in the first telegraphed message to a press association during the Civil War, noted at the end of the dispatch. Others cite the telegrapher's practice of using "XXX" to signal the end of transmission. Since "X" is the Roman numeral for 10, three X's equals 30.

-- Marcella Fleming

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