Word.ws English Dictionary

Verdanagate

UK/vəˈdɑː.nəˌɡeɪt/US/vəɹˈdɑː.nəˌɡeɪt/

Verdanagate proper noun: a 2000s controversy around the change of the typeface from Futura to Verdana in IKEA's product catalogues.

Proper noun

Verdanagate

  1. A 2000s controversy around the change of the typeface from Futura to Verdana in IKEA's product catalogues.
    • Like most of us here, I have been following the IKEA debacle over the switch from its proprietary Futura to the egalitarian Verdana as the corporate type family used from catalogs to store signage across the world. [see title]2009 August 31, Armin Vit, “Verdanagate”, in Brand New, archived from the original on 02 Sep 2009
    • The New York Times joked that ‘it was perhaps the biggest controversy to ever come out of Sweden’. Wikipedia wasted no time in accepting a new page called Verdanagate. It became the hot topic – the fontroversy – in Graphic Tweets.2010, Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, London: Profile Books, →ISBN, pages 81–82

Examples of Verdanagate in a sentence

  • Swedish furniture retailer IKEA in 2009 changed its catalog font from Futura to Verdana, infuriating the design community and provoking a media storm, which became known as Verdanagate.2011, Alexei Kapterev, “The Slides’ Unity” (chapter 7), in Presentation Secrets: Do what You Never Thought Possible with Your...
  • Meanwhile, during ‘Verdanagate’, unbridled fury was unleashed after furniture store Ikea made what it thought was an innocuous switch from Futura to Verdana.2013 April 30, Etan Smallman, “To Helvetica and back: Our love/hate relationship with typefaces”, in Metro, archived from the original on...

Origin of Verdanagate

From Verdana + -gate.

Questions about Verdanagate

What does Verdanagate mean?
Verdanagate means a 2000s controversy around the change of the typeface from Futura to Verdana in IKEA's product catalogues.
How do you use Verdanagate in a sentence?
Swedish furniture retailer IKEA in 2009 changed its catalog font from Futura to Verdana, infuriating the design community and provoking a media storm, which became known as Verdanagate.
What part of speech is Verdanagate?
Verdanagate is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Verdanagate?
Verdanagate is pronounced /vəˈdɑː.nəˌɡeɪt/ (UK).

Words near Verdanagate in the dictionary

  1. verd antique
  2. verdaccio
  3. verdaccios
  4. Verdadism
  5. verdaille
  6. Verdanagate
  7. verdancies
  8. verdancy
  9. Verdandi
  10. verdant
  11. verdantly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Verdanagate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Verdanagate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/verdanagate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.