google-fonts/cc-by-sa/knowledge/glossary/terms/icon_font/content.md

An icon font is a font that exclusively contains icon glyphs rather than alphanumeric glyphs. A couple of examples are Material Icons and Material Symbols—both are icon fonts, although Material Symbols is a variable font, allowing for fine-tuning via variable axes.


Using fonts to render icons has multiple benefits:

• Being vector-based, they’re infinitely scalable, unlike rasterized images.
• Contained in one file, the file size is considerably smaller than a collection of individual images—even vector-based ones.
• When used on the web, they can be colored and positioned using just CSS, and browser support is excellent.
• When using variable icon fonts, they’re customizable in a way that allows them to be more closely matched to any accompanying type.