Thanks, everyone, for pointing out the "accident of history". This is a little morality tale about clever programming. Joe Ossanna would never have tokenized \s constructs that way if the CAT typesetter had been capable of a wider range of type sizes. Brian seems to have kept it for backward compatibility. But groff was perfectly willing to break backward compatibility in tokenizing command names. Why not in \s? I encourage Branden to go whole hog and let \s123DEWEY WINS produce a banner headline. Doug