The Greek translation of calligraphy is "beautiful letters". Modern calligraphy ranges from functional hand lettered inscriptions and designs to fine art pieces where the abstract expression of the handwritten mark may or may not take precedence over the legibility of the letters. A  calligrapher is able to create characters which are historically disciplined yet fluid and spontaneous, improvised at the moment of writing. Calligraphy continues to flourish in the forms of wedding and event invitations, font design and typography, original hand-lettered logo design, religious art, poster and graphic design and commissioned calligraphic art, cut stone inscriptions and memorial documents and also still graphics and moving images for film and television.

Western calligraphy is recognizable by the use of the Roman alphabet which came from the Phoenecian, Greek and Etruscan alphabets. The Roman alphabet appeared in Rome in the 1st Century BC and is seen as Roman Square Capitals carved on stones, Rustic Capitals painted on walls and Roman Cursive for daily use. This development continued into the second and third centuries using the Uncial, derived from cursive. Writing withdrew to monasteries and was preserved there during the fourth and fifth centuries, when the Roman Empire finally fell and Europe entered the Dark Ages.

At the height of the Roman Empire its power had reached as far as Great Britain. When the empire fell, its literary influence remained in most of it's former territories. In the British Isles the Semi-Uncial transformed into the Irish Semi-uncial and the Small Anglo-Saxon script. Each region seemed to have developed its own standards following the lead of the main monastery of the region (i.e. Merovingian Script, Laon script, Luxeil Script and Visigothic Script which are mostly cursive and sometimes hardly readable.

The rise of the Carolingian Empire encouraged the introduction of a new standardized script, developed by several famous monasteries including Corbie abbey and Beauvais around the eighth century. Finally the script from Saint Martin de Tours was set as the Imperial standard and named the Carolingian script (or "the Caroline"). Originating in the now powerful Carolingian Empire, this standard eventually became used in neighbouring kingdoms.

About the eleventh century, the Caroline evolved into the Gothic Script - more cursive and more suitable for daily use. In the fifteenth century, with the Gothic script having been the standard form for several centuries, calligraphers rediscovered old Carolingian texts which culminated in the creation of the Antiqua Script (about 1470). The seventeenth century saw the Batarde Script from France, and the eighteenth century saw the English Script spread across Europe and the world via printed books.

The contemporary typefaces found on every computer, whether in simple word processing programs like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, through to a professional designer's software package owe a considerable debt to the past and to a small number of professional typeface designers today.