If you would press the CTRL and equal sign, you will get the subscript effect. A subscript may refer to just one character or a whole word that may be placed below the usual writing line. There are different reasons why people use this. A lot of people may use subscripts and even superscripts in order to write different mathematical and scientific formulas.
There are some chemical compounds and isotopes that would require these scripts so that they can be easily understood. If you would like to bring your text back to normal from a subscript, you can press the same buttons again.