http://jsfiddle.net/mJxn4/ This is very odd: I have a few lines of text wrapped in an <em> tag. No matter what I do, lowering the value for line-height below 17px has no effect. I can bump the line-height up to greater than 17px and it'll apply, but I can't get it lower than 17px. The CSS in question is: #others .item em { font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; } Try adjusting the line height both higher and lower and run the updated fiddle after each change, and you'll see what I mean. Why would this be? No line-height is specified anywhere else in the CSS, so nothing is overriding it. That couldn't be the case anyway because I'm adjusting the line-height up and down within the same selector, so it doesn't make sense that a higher value would apply, but a lower value would get overridden.