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In typography
Typography

Typography is the art and techniques of typesetting, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques....
, all caps (short for all capitals or all capitalized; often written as ALL CAPS) refers to text or a font
Typeface

In typography, a typeface is a set of one or more fonts, in one or more sizes, designed with stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinated set of glyphs....
 in which all letters are capital letters.

All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, advertising
Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to Purchasing or to consume more of a particular brand of Product or Service ....
, billboards
Billboard (advertising)

A billboard is a large Out-of-home advertising structure , typically found in high traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large Advertising to passing pedestrians and drivers....
, and in dramatic newspaper headlines. Short strings of words in all caps appear bolder and "louder" than mixed case. All caps is also used to indicate that a given word is an acronym.

re the development of lower case letters in the 8th century, texts in the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
 were written in a single case, which is now considered to be capital letters.






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In typography
Typography

Typography is the art and techniques of typesetting, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques....
, all caps (short for all capitals or all capitalized; often written as ALL CAPS) refers to text or a font
Typeface

In typography, a typeface is a set of one or more fonts, in one or more sizes, designed with stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinated set of glyphs....
 in which all letters are capital letters.

All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, advertising
Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to Purchasing or to consume more of a particular brand of Product or Service ....
, billboards
Billboard (advertising)

A billboard is a large Out-of-home advertising structure , typically found in high traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large Advertising to passing pedestrians and drivers....
, and in dramatic newspaper headlines. Short strings of words in all caps appear bolder and "louder" than mixed case. All caps is also used to indicate that a given word is an acronym.

Usage


Print media

Before the development of lower case letters in the 8th century, texts in the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
 were written in a single case, which is now considered to be capital letters. However, the shapes of words set in lowercase provide a valuable cue to readers that helps speed the process of reading; type in all caps forms a rectangular shape for every word, which makes distinguishing words harder. As a result, text in all caps is not widely used in body copy
Running text

In typography, running text or body copy is the writing that makes up the majority of the page. Running text is typically broken up into paragraphs, can be placed in multiple columns, and is traditionally written in a serif font, though in recent times sans-serif fonts have occasionally been used....
, as it is difficult to read in extended passages. The major exception to this is so-called small print
Small print

Small print refers to the practice of including necessary legal terms, warnings, disclaimers or other phrases in small writing on commercial or contractual documents....
 in advertisements and legal documents, where the typesetter has incentive to make the text inaccessible.

Internet

This form of typography also appears in on-line forums. It was once an inevitable byproduct of using machines with limited support for lowercase text (such as certain dumb terminals, early Apple II models), but as full support of ASCII
ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
 became standard, it became solely identified with "shouting" or attention-seeking behaviour. As a result, netiquette
Netiquette

Netiquette, a Portmanteau word of "computer network etiquette", is a set of social conventions that facilitate interaction over networks, ranging from Usenet and mailing lists to blogs and Internet forum....
 generally discourages the use of all caps.

Other

Writing in all caps (possibly with underscore
Underscore

The underscore [ _ ] is a character that originally appeared on the typewriter. Prior to the advent of word processing, the underscore character was the only method of underline words....
s replacing space
Space (punctuation)

In writing, a space is a blank area that is devoid of content, which word divider, letters, numbers, and punctuation. Conventions for interword separation and intersentence spaces vary among languages, and in some cases the spacing rules are quite complex....
s) is an identifier naming convention in many programming language
Programming language

A programming language is a machine-readable artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer....
s that symbolizes that the given identifier represents a constant
Variable

A variable is a symbol that stands for a value that may vary; the term usually occurs in opposition to constant, which is a symbol for a non-varying value, i.e....
.

In CSS


All caps can be specified in CSS
CSS

CSS may stand for:...
 using "text-transform: uppercase;". For example, the HTML
HTML

HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
Jane Doe
renders as
Jane Doe.


In many cases this is better than typing text directly in capitals, because one can easily change text style (e.g. replace all-caps with bold or colored font, if deemed necessary).

See also

  • Caps lock
    Caps lock

    The caps lock is a key on a computer keyboard. Pressing it will set a keyboard mode in which typed letters are capital letter by default and in lower case when the shift key is pressed; the keyboard remains in this mode until caps lock is pressed again....
  • Small caps
    Small caps

    In typography, small capitals are uppercase graphemes set at the same height as surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. They are used in running text to prevent capitalized words from appearing too large on the page, and as a method of emphasis or distinctiveness for text alongside or instead of italics, or when boldface is inappr...
  • CamelCase
    CamelCase

    CamelCase is the practice of writing compound noun and adjectives or phrases in which the words are joined without Whitespace s and are capitalization within the compound?as in Patti LaBelle, Visual Basic, or iPod....