Strong Importance

Strong importance is used to represent text that should be given extra emphasis.

In Markdown, stress emphasis is defined by placing double asterisks or underscores around the text that is to be emphasised. For example, to give strong importance to the word “lazy”:

The quick brown fox jumped over the **lazy** dog.

The quick brown fox jumped over the __lazy__ dog.

Using asterisks or underscores has the same result in most cases. However, as with stress emphasis, CommonMark compliant applications make a distinction when underscores are used within words.

Asterisks may be used to give strong importance within a word, for example:

The quick brown fox **jump**ed over the lazy dog.

The text “jump” is given strong importance here. Whereas if double underscores are used, the word “jump” is not given strong importance; literal underscores are rendered instead:

The quick brown fox __jump__ed over the lazy dog.

This is useful when using programming code and web addresses within Markdown documents as these often contain underscores in the middle of words.

By default, applications and websites usually display strong importance as bold text.