em tag for Emphasis

The em tag is used to add emphasis to a word or phrase. The emphasized text is rendered in italics in most browsers.

You may wonder why there is an and an tag since both are displayed in italics.

Technically, the emphasis tag was meant to provide emphasis aurally for people surfing using screen readers, while the italics tag was meant to provide emphasis visually.

A word stressed with an emphasis tag should be stressed aloud by the screen reader software, but a word stressed with the italics tag won't necessarily be stressed by screen readers.

Here's an example of usage:

Can you see which word is emphasized?

That sample looks like this on a web page: