Words for what a typewriter actually does.

Touch

The keystroke itself — how far it goes, how evenly it returns, how it feels under the pad of your finger. The most personal of the dimensions and the hardest to translate from one person's hand to another's.

Depth — how far the key travels

Evenness — whether each key feels the same

Character — what the keystroke feels like

Sound

What the machine sounds like in a quiet room. The factor most often cited as a buying consideration and the one a photo on eBay can't tell you anything about.

Volume — how loud

Register — pitch and character

Sustain — how the sound decays

The bell

Often a single word's worth of attention and yet — when you sit with a machine for hours — its bell is one of the things you'll know best about it.

Bell character

Carriage

How the carriage moves across the platen — its glide, its return throw, its end-of-line behaviour. A surprising amount of how a machine feels to write on comes down to this.

Glide — how smoothly it moves

Return — what happens when you throw it back

Desk presence

How the machine sits on a surface — does it ground itself, perch, drift? An underrated dimension; a typewriter that moves under you is a typewriter you fight with.

Visual

What the machine looks like, by era and by finish. Less important than how it writes but worth its own vocabulary, because a typewriter sits in your space whether you're writing on it or not.

Personality

The half-anthropomorphic, half-honest way collectors talk about their machines. These are descriptors, not assignments — most machines are several of these at once, or none.