forcing text size - a newbie question or two

So new to HTML that I'm sure everyone else knows this, but...
How can you force IE or NS to always display text at a minimum size (say, equivalent to 14 point). I was having success with IE5.0 but IE5.5 won't play, nor will any version of NS that I can find.
I thought {FONT-SIZE: 14pt} would be good enough, inside a <STYLE> tag, but I'm not even up with understanding any CSS yet, so I reckon there's some easy answer? Please? Pretty please??

If you dont want to use CSS then you have to apply the following tag to all the blocks of text in your document.

<font face="verdana, helvetica, tahoma" size=1>your text</font>

Or dont aply a size at all and leave it to the default size which is close to 14pt

Thanks for this. Glad somebody is out there reading my scribble.
However (you knew this was coming...) the
<font face="verdana, helvetica, tahoma" size=1>your text</font> is similar to what I have used and NS still changes it, I think. I'll try a page or two and see what gives.
I guess it will be CSS because I need to fix the font size if at all possible - the site is for older people who may have sight impairments and less techno-knowledge to adjust the browser's settings.
But thanks again!