Hanging Indent
A paragraph whose first line sits left of the rest — the standard shape of a bibliography entry.
A hanging indent reverses the normal first-line indent: line one starts at the margin and every subsequent line is indented, usually by 0.5 inch or 1 em. The visual effect is that the entry's first element — normally the author's surname — projects into the white space and can be scanned down a page at speed.
It is required by APA, MLA, and Chicago for reference lists and bibliographies for exactly that reason: readers arrive at a bibliography looking for one name, and the hanging indent turns a wall of text into an index.
It also appears in glossaries, dialogue in play scripts, and verse with turned lines, where a runover needs to be visibly distinct from a new item. In CSS it is produced with a positive padding-left and a matching negative text-indent, not with manual line breaks.
Common mistake: faking a hanging indent with spaces or line breaks. It collapses the moment the text reflows at a different width, which is every time on the web.
“Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed., Allyn and Bacon, 2000.”
Keep reading the glossary
The list of works cited or consulted, printed at the end of a book, chapter, or article.
A long quotation set off from the surrounding text by margin indentation instead of quotation marks.
A long quotation set off as its own indented paragraph, without quotation marks.
A formal reference that lets a reader locate the source of a quote.