A light-armed foot soldier of the ancient militia of Ireland and Scotland; often used as a term of contempt
c.1599: O, then belike she was old and gentle; and you rode like a kern of Ireland, your French hose off and in your strait strossers. — Henry V: Ac.3 Sc7, Wm. Shakespeare.
To adjust the horizontal space between selected pairs of letters (characters or glyphs), particularly in a proportional font (printing)
To adjust the space between letters so that it appears optically proportioned In hot metal, a kern was any part of a letter that extended into the space occupied by an adjacent letter
The specific amount of space added to or subtracted from the combined side bearings between the two characters of a kerning pair
to adjust the display position whilst rendering in order to visually improve the spacing between two glyphs For instance, kerning causes the word to be rendered as , reducing the illusion of white space between the diagonal strokes of the W, A, and V
To selectively adjust the space between characters to improve readability or to achieve balanced, proportional type