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Gaelic type (sometimes called Irish character, Irish type, or Gaelic script) is a family of Insular script typefaces devised for printing Early Modern Irish. It was widely used from the 16th century until the mid-18th century in Scotland and the mid-20th century in Ireland, but is now rarely used. Sometimes, all Gaelic typefaces are called Celtic or uncial although most Gaelic types are not uncials. The "Anglo-Saxon" types of the 17th century are included in this category because both the Anglo-Saxon types and the Gaelic/Irish types derive from the insular manuscript hand.
The terms Gaelic type, Gaelic script and Irish character translate the Modern Irish phrase cló Gaelach (). In Ireland, the term cló Gaelach is used in opposition to the term cló Rómhánach, Roman type.
The Scots Gaelic term is corra-litir (). italic=no (–1770) was one of the last Scottish writers with the ability to write in this script, but his main work, Ais-Eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich, was published in the Roman script.
Gaelic typefaces also often include insular forms: of the letters and , and some of the typefaces contain a number of ligatures used in earlier Gaelic typography and deriving from the manuscript tradition. Lower-case is drawn without a tittle (though it is not the dotless i), and the letters have insular shapes .
Many modern Gaelic typefaces include Gaelic letterforms for the letters , and typically provide support for at least the vowels of the other . They also distinguish between and (as did traditional typography), though some modern fonts replace the ampersand with the Tironian note ostensibly because both mean 'and'.
In 1611, Franciscans from Louvain, Belgium, created their own typeface, known as Louvain Irish Type.
In 1996 italic=no created a new corporate logo. The logo consists of a modern take on the Gaelic type face. The R's counter is large with a short tail, the T is roman script while the E is curved but does not have a counter like a lower case E, and the letters also have slight serifs to them. TG4's original logo, under the brand TnaG, also used a modernization of the font, the use of the curved T and a sans-serif A in the word na. Other Irish companies that have used Gaelic script in their logos including the GAA, italic=no and italic=no. The italic=no uses Gaelic Script on its official seal.
According to Michael Everson, in the 2006 Unicode proposal for these characters:
Unicode 5.1 (2008) added a capital G (Ᵹ) and both capital and lowercase letters D, F, R, S, T, besides "turned insular G", on the basis that Edward Lhuyd used these letters in his 1707 work Archæologia Britannica as a scientific orthography for Cornish language.
Unicode 14.0 (2021) added characters, including Insular letters, for the Ormulum:
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