A swash glyph is a decorative, alternate variant most commonly found in serif and script typefaces. These glyphs possess more elaborate and ornate flourishes (such as actual swashes) than their regular letterform counterparts.
Because of the extra space often taken up by swashes, special attention should be paid to where they appear in a word. Often, their most suitable location is at the beginning or end of a word (for this reason, swash capitals are intended only for the beginning of capitalised words), and a common mistake made by novice typographers is to use swash characters that cause an undesirable collision between letterforms.
Expertly coded fonts with swash glyphs have built-in rules that avoid such clashes, while fonts of a lesser quality are more likely to have them.
Swashes (if they exist in the font file) can be turned on and off via OpenType.
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