CSS Text Emphasis

Emphasizing text in CSS

By using the CSS text-emphasis property, you can draw attention to textual elements (letters, numbers, but not spaces or control characters):

p {
    text-emphasis: filled sesame;
    -webkit-text-emphasis: filled sesame;
}

The text emphasis symbols are about a half the font size. It can also affect line height.

How to use CSS emphasis

CSS text-emphasis is actually a shorthand for two subproperties:

• text-emphasis-style
• text-emphasis-color

Therefore, the syntax is similar to that of many other shorthands:

text-emphasis: style color;

The CSS text emphasis style can be defined in:

• Keywords: none (the default value), filled, open, dot, circle, double-circle, triangle, or sesame
• A string containing one character that will be used as the CSS emphasis symbol

You can define the CSS text emphasis color using a name, RGB, RGBA, HEX, HSL or HSLA value. If you don't specify the color, CSS text emphasis will use the color of the text.

Tip: to get the value for the exact color tone you need, use the Pickeristic color picker.

Browser support

Mobile browser support