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A serif is a short, flat little line at the top or bottom of some printed letters — like a tiny foot or cap on the stroke. Many paper books use type with these lines; designers call that serif type. Type without them is sans serif (sans is French for without). Ordinary readers may not know the name, but they feel the difference: serif type often looks more like a traditional book, and sans serif often looks cleaner on a phone screen. It is a designer's word, not a home word. You almost never need it unless you are talking about fonts.
襯線
組成The earlier spellings were ceriph, seriph, surryph, and the origin is still not settled. One idea is Dutch schreef (a stroke), related to scraping a line. Another is Dutch schrafferen (to shade with lines), from Italian sgraffiare; German Schraffe may have borrowed the idea from English rather than the other way round. A third idea is Late Latin cerificus (waxen), from Latin cera (wax), after the ruled lines in wax tablets. Scholars do not agree, so there is no single clean story.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
serifnoun/ˈsɛɹɪf/
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mediapublishingtypographyA short line added to the end of a stroke in traditional typefaces, such as Times New Roman.
- It is generally believed, by those who study such things, that serif typefaces are easier to read when reading a lot of words. The hickeys (serifs) on each letter tend to push our eye toward the next letter.
serifadj/ˈsɛɹɪf/
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mediapublishingtypographyOf a typeface, provided with serifs.
- It is generally believed, by those who study such things, that serif typefaces are easier to read when reading a lot of words. The hickeys (serifs) on each letter tend to push our eye toward the next letter.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。