In
orthographyThe orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
and
typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
,
letter case (or just
case) is the distinction between the larger
majuscule (
capital,
caps,
upper-case,
upper case, or
uppercase) and smaller
minuscule (
lower-case, etc.) letters. The term originated with the shallow drawers called
type caseA type case is a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing....
s still used to hold the
movable typeMovable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
for
letterpress printingLetterpress printing is relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image...
.
In the Roman alphabet, majuscules (icon or ˈ) are
A,
B,
C, etc.; minuscules are
a,
b,
c, etc.
Most
occidentalWestern culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
languages (certainly those based on the
LatinThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
,
CyrillicThe Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
,
GreekThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
,
Armenian alphabetThe Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. It was devised by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader, and contained originally 36 letters. Two more letters, օ and ֆ, were added in the Middle Ages...
s, and
Coptic alphabetThe Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language...
s) use multiple letter-cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. Scripts using two separate cases are also called "bicameral scripts". Many other
writing systemA writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
s (such as those used in the
Georgian languageThe Georgian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Georgian language and other Kartvelian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus such as Ossetic and Abkhaz during the 1940s...
,
GlagoliticThe Glagolitic alphabet , also known as Glagolitsa, is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. The name was not coined until many centuries after its creation, and comes from the Old Slavic glagolъ "utterance" . The verb glagoliti means "to speak"...
,
ArabicThe Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
,
HebrewThe Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
, and
DevanagariDevanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
) make no distinction between capital and lowercase letters – a system called
unicaseA unicase or unicameral alphabet is one that has no case for its letters. Tamil, Arabic, Old Hungarian, Hebrew, Georgian and Hangul are unicase alphabets, while Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian have two cases for each letter, e.g., B/b, Β/β, Б/б,...
. If an alphabet has case, all or nearly all letters have both forms. Both forms in each pair are considered to be the same letter: they have the same name, same pronunciation, and will be treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order. An example of a letter without both forms is the German
ßIn the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...
(
ess-tsett), which exists only in minuscule. When capitalized it normally becomes two letters ("SS"), but the ß letter may be used as a capital to prevent confusion in special cases, such as names. This is because ß was originally a
ligatureIn writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms", where the specific shape of a letter depends on...
of the two letters "ſs" (a
long sThe long, medial or descending s is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example "ſinfulneſs" . The modern letterform was called the terminal, round, or short s.-History:The long s is derived from the old Roman cursive...
and an s), both of which become "S" when capitalized. It later evolved into a letter in its own right. (ß is also occasionally referred to as a ligature of "sz", which recalls the way this consonant was pronounced in some medieval German dialects. The original spelling
sz is preserved in
HungarianHungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
and pronounced [s].)
Languages have
capitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
rules to determine whether majuscules or minuscules are to be used in a given context. In
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence, a
proper nounA proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
, or a
proper adjectiveIn English usage, a proper adjective is an adjective that takes an initial capital letter. A common adjective is an adjective that is not a proper adjective...
, and for initials or
abbreviationAn abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase...
s. The first-person pronoun "I" and the interjection "O" are also capitalized. Lower-case letters are normally used for all other purposes. There are however situations where further capitalization may be used to give added emphasis, for example in headings and titles or to pick out certain words (often using small capitals). There are also a few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalization of the first letter. Other languages vary in their use of capitals. For example, in
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
the first letter of all nouns is capitalized, while in
Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
the names of days of the week, months of the year, and adjectives of nationality, religion and so on generally begin with a lower-case letter.
Case comparison
Here is a comparison of the majuscule and minuscule versions of each letter used in the English language. The exact representation will vary according to the
fontIn typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
used.
| Upper Case: |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
| Lower Case: |
a |
b |
c |
d |
e |
f |
g |
h |
i |
j |
k |
l |
m |
n |
o |
p |
q |
r |
s |
t |
u |
v |
w |
x |
y |
z |
History
Originally
alphabetAn alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
s were written entirely in capital letters, spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. When written quickly with a
penA pen is a device used to apply ink to a surface, usually paper, for writing or drawing. Historically, reed pens, quill pens, and dip pens were used, with a nib of some sort to be dipped in the ink. Ruling pens allow precise adjustment of line width, and still find a few specialized uses, but...
, these tended to turn into rounder and much simpler forms, like
uncialUncial is a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Uncial letters are written in either Greek, Latin, or Gothic.-Development:...
s. It is from these that the first minuscule hands developed, the half-uncials and cursive minuscule, which no longer stay bound between a pair of lines. These in turn formed the foundations for the
Carolingian minusculeCarolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200...
script, developed by
AlcuinAlcuin of York or Ealhwine, nicknamed Albinus or Flaccus was an English scholar, ecclesiastic, poet and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York...
for use in the court of
CharlemagneCharlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...
, which quickly spread across Europe.
European languages, except for
Ancient GreekAncient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
and
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, did not make the case distinction before about 1300. In Latin, papyrii from
HerculaneumHerculaneum was an ancient Roman town destroyed by volcanic pyroclastic flows in AD 79, located in the territory of the current commune of Ercolano, in the Italian region of Campania in the shadow of Mt...
dating before 79 have been found which include lower-case letters a, b, d, h, p, and r. According to papyrologist Knut Kleve, "The theory, then, that the lower-case letters have been developed from the fifth century uncials and the ninth century Carolingian miniscules seems to be wrong."
Both "majuscule" and "minuscule" letters existed, but the
printing pressA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
had not yet been invented, and a given handwritten document could use either one size/style or the other. However, before about 1700
literacyLiteracy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
was very low in Europe and the
AmericasThe Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
, hence even handwriting was not used or understood by more than about 1% of people. Therefore, there was not any motivation to use both upper case and lower case letters in the same document as all documents were used by only a small number of scholars.
The timeline of writing in Western Europe can be divided into four eras:
- Greek majuscule (9th – 3rd century B.C.) in contrast to the Greek uncial script (3rd century B.C. – 12 century A.D.) and the later Greek minuscule
- Roman majuscule
Roman square capitals, also called capitalis monumentalis, inscriptional capitals, elegant capitals and quadrata, are an ancient Roman form of writing, and the basis for modern capital letters....
(7th century B.C. – 4th century A.D.) in contrast to the Roman uncial (4th – 8th century B.C.), Roman Half Uncial, and minuscule
- Carolingian
The Carolingian dynasty was a Frankish noble family with origins in the Arnulfing and Pippinid clans of the 7th century AD. The name "Carolingian", Medieval Latin karolingi, an altered form of an unattested Old High German *karling, kerling The Carolingian dynasty (known variously as the...
majuscule (4th – 8th century A.D.) in contrast to the Carolingian minusculeCarolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200...
(around 780 – 12th century)
- Gothic
The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language, created in the 4th century by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Christian Bible....
majuscule (13th and 14th century), in contrast to the early Gothic (end of 11th to 13th century), Gothic (14th century), and late Gothic (16th century) minuscules.
Traditionally, certain letters were rendered differently according to a set of rules. In particular, those letters that began sentences or nouns were made larger and often written in a distinct script. There was no fixed capitalization system until the early 18th century. The
English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
eventually dropped the rule for nouns, while the
German languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
kept it.
Similar developments have taken place in other alphabets. The lower-case script for the
Greek alphabetThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
has its origins in the 7th century and acquired its quadrilinear form in the 8th century. Over time, uncial letter forms were increasingly mixed into the script. The earliest dated Greek lower-case text is the
Uspenski GospelsUspenski Gospels, Minuscule 461 , ε 92 , are a New Testament minuscule manuscript written in Greek, dated at 835 AD...
(MS 461) in the year 835. The modern practice of capitalizing the first letter of every sentence seems to be imported (and is rarely used when printing Ancient Greek materials even today).
The
Samaritan alphabetThe Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic....
also had lower-case letters, making it relatively unusual among
abjadAn abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
s such as
HebrewThe Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
,
SyriacThe Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC . It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Aramaic alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and the traditional Mongolian alphabets.-...
and
ArabicThe Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
, which tend to be written without case.
Terminology
The term
lower case originated in the early days of the
printing pressA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
used with
movable typeMovable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
in
letterpress printingLetterpress printing is relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image...
. The individual type blocks used in hand
typesettingTypesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
are stored in shallow wooden or metal drawers, known as cases, with subdivisions into compartments known as boxes to store each individual letter. In many countries the majuscules and minuscules are stored separately, with a pair of boxes for each
typefaceIn typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
at a specific size. For typesetting, the two cases are taken out of the storage rack and placed on a rack on the compositor's desk. By convention, the case containing the capitals (and small capitals) stands at a steeper angle at the back of the desk, with the case for the small letters, punctuation and spaces, at a shallower angle below it to the front of the desk, hence upper and lower case. The term "upper case" is a backformation and not used by printers to classify capital letters. The upper case contained accented letters, numbers and capital ligatures in addition to capital letters and comes from the antique age of setting type for printing presses, when printers kept the type for these letters in the upper drawers of a desk or in the upper
type caseA type case is a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing....
, while keeping the type for the more frequently-used smaller letters in the lower type case within easy reach.
Various patterns of cases are available, often with the compartments for lower-case letters varying in size according to the frequency of use of letters, so that the commonest letters are grouped together in larger boxes at the centre of the case. The compositor takes the letter blocks from the compartments and places them in a
composing stickIn letterpress printing and typesetting, a composing stick is an instrument used to assemble pieces of metal type into words and lines which are later bound into a forme, set in a galley and printed...
, working from left to right and placing the letters upside down with the nick to the top, then sets the assembled type in a
galleyIn printing and publishing, proofs are the preliminary versions of publications meant for review by authors, editors, and proofreaders, often with extra wide margins. Galley proofs may be uncut and unbound, or in some cases electronic...
.
The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Advanced Proportional Principles (reprinted 1952) indicates that this usage of "case" (as the box or frame used by a compositor in the printing trade) was first used in 1588. Originally one large case was used for each typeface, then "divided cases", pairs of cases for upper and lower case, were introduced in the region of today's Belgium by 1563, England by 1588, and France before 1723. Though pairs of cases were used in English-speaking countries and many European countries in Germany and Scandinavia the single case continued in use.
For paleographers, a majuscule script is any script in which the letters have very few or very short ascenders and descenders, or none at all (for example, the majuscule scripts used in the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, or the
Book of KellsThe Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. It was created by Celtic monks ca. 800 or slightly earlier...
).
The word
minuscule is often spelled
miniscule, by association with the unrelated word
miniature and the prefix
mini-. This has traditionally been regarded as a spelling mistake (since
minuscule is derived from the word
minus), but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a nonstandard or variant spelling. However,
miniscule is still less likely to be used for lower-case letters.
Other forms of case
The distinction between
hiraganais a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
and
katakanais a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
in
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
is similar to, but not the same as, case; it may also be considered analogous to upright and italics characters. While each sound has both a hiragana and katakana, any given word will use only one of the two scripts normally. If a word is written with hiragana, it is not normally considered correct to write it with katakana, and vice versa. However, katakana may be substituted for
hiraganais a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
or
kanjiKanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
to add emphasis or make them stand out, similar to the use of capitalization or
italicsIn typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.- Methods and use :...
in English.
Also similar to case is recent usage in
GeorgianThe Georgian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Georgian language and other Kartvelian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus such as Ossetic and Abkhaz during the 1940s...
, where some authors use isolated letters from the Asomtavruli alphabet within a text otherwise written in Mkhedruli in a fashion that is reminiscent of modern usage of letter case in the
LatinThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
,
GreekThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
, and
Cyrillic alphabetThe Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
s.
Usage
In scripts with a case distinction, lower case is generally used for the majority of text; capitals are used for
capitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
, acronyms,
medial capitalsCamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
, and
emphasisIn typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.- Methods and use :...
(in some languages).
Capital letters were sometimes used for typographical emphasis in text made on a typewriter. However, long spans of Latin-alphabet text in all upper-case are harder to read because of the absence of the ascenders and
descenderIn typography, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. The line that descenders reach down to is known as the beard line....
s found in lower-case letters, which can aid recognition. With the advent of modern computer editing technology and the
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, emphasis is usually indicated by use of a single word
CapitalCapitals is a serif font composed entirely of capital letters. Capitals was one of the available operating system fonts that could be applied to the Macintosh operating system using the Appearance Manager....
,
italicIn typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
, or bold font, similar to what has long been common practice in print. In typesetting, when an acronym or initialism requires a string of upper-case letters, it is frequently set in small capitals, to avoid overemphasizing the word in mostly lower-case running text. In
electronic communicationsThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, it is often considered very poor "
netiquetteNetiquette is a set of social conventions that facilitate interaction over networks, ranging from Usenet and mailing lists to blogs and forums. These rules were described in IETF RFC 1855. However, like many Internet phenomena, the concept and its application remain in a state of flux, and vary...
" to type in
all capitalsIn typography, all caps refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters. All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines...
, because it can be harder to read and because it is seen as tantamount to shouting. Indeed, this is the oft-used name for the practice.
Larry TraskRobert Lawrence "Larry" Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and an authority on the Basque language and historical linguistics....
states that "it is possible to write an entire word or phrase in capital letters in order to emphasize it", but adds that "on the whole, though, it is preferable to express emphasis, not with capital letters, but with italics."
CapitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
is the
writingWriting is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
of a
wordIn language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
with its first
letter in uppercase and the remaining letters in lowercase. Capitalization rules vary by
languageLanguage may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
and are often quite complex, but in most modern languages that have capitalization, the first word of every
sentenceIn the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
is capitalized, as are all
proper nounA proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
s. Some languages, such as
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, capitalize the first letter of all nouns; this was previously common in
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
as well. (See the article on
capitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
for a detailed list of norms).
In English, a variety of case styles are used in various circumstances:
- Capitalization in English, in terms of the general orthographic rules independent of context (e.g., title vs heading vs text), is universally standardized for formal writing. For example, it is universal to begin a sentence with a cap, and to cap proper nouns, wherever formal orthography is in force. (Informal communication, such as texting, IM, or a handwritten sticky note, may not bother, of course; but that's because its users usually do not expect it to be formal.)
- Sentence case: The most common in English prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
. Generally equivalent to the baseline universal standard of formal English orthography mentioned above; that is, only the first word is capitalized, except for proper nounA proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
s and other words which are generally capitalized by a more specific rule.
- Title case: All words are capitalized except for certain subsets defined by rules that are not universally standardized. The standardization is only at the level of house styles and individual style manuals. (See further explanation below at Headings and publication titles.)
- ALL CAPS
In typography, all caps refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters. All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines...
: Only capital letters are used.
-
{{About||the minimalist musical sub-genre|Lowercase (music)|New Testament minuscules|:Category:Greek New Testament minuscules}}
In orthographyThe orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
and typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, letter case (or just case) is the distinction between the larger majuscule (capital, caps, upper-case, upper case, or uppercase) and smaller minuscule (lower-case, etc.) letters. The term originated with the shallow drawers called type caseA type case is a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing....
s still used to hold the movable typeMovable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
for letterpress printingLetterpress printing is relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image...
.
In the Roman alphabet, majuscules (icon or ˈ) are A, B, C, etc.; minuscules are a, b, c, etc.
Most occidentalWestern culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
languages (certainly those based on the LatinThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, CyrillicThe Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
, GreekThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
, Armenian alphabetThe Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. It was devised by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader, and contained originally 36 letters. Two more letters, օ and ֆ, were added in the Middle Ages...
s, and Coptic alphabetThe Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language...
s) use multiple letter-cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. Scripts using two separate cases are also called "bicameral scripts". Many other writing systemA writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
s (such as those used in the Georgian languageThe Georgian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Georgian language and other Kartvelian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus such as Ossetic and Abkhaz during the 1940s...
, GlagoliticThe Glagolitic alphabet , also known as Glagolitsa, is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. The name was not coined until many centuries after its creation, and comes from the Old Slavic glagolъ "utterance" . The verb glagoliti means "to speak"...
, ArabicThe Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
, HebrewThe Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
, and DevanagariDevanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
) make no distinction between capital and lowercase letters – a system called unicaseA unicase or unicameral alphabet is one that has no case for its letters. Tamil, Arabic, Old Hungarian, Hebrew, Georgian and Hangul are unicase alphabets, while Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian have two cases for each letter, e.g., B/b, Β/β, Б/б,...
. If an alphabet has case, all or nearly all letters have both forms. Both forms in each pair are considered to be the same letter: they have the same name, same pronunciation, and will be treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order. An example of a letter without both forms is the German ßIn the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...
(ess-tsett), which exists only in minuscule. When capitalized it normally becomes two letters ("SS"), but the ß letter may be used as a capital to prevent confusion in special cases, such as names. This is because ß was originally a ligatureIn writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms", where the specific shape of a letter depends on...
of the two letters "ſs" (a long sThe long, medial or descending s is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example "ſinfulneſs" . The modern letterform was called the terminal, round, or short s.-History:The long s is derived from the old Roman cursive...
and an s), both of which become "S" when capitalized. It later evolved into a letter in its own right. (ß is also occasionally referred to as a ligature of "sz", which recalls the way this consonant was pronounced in some medieval German dialects. The original spelling sz is preserved in HungarianHungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
and pronounced [s].)
Languages have capitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
rules to determine whether majuscules or minuscules are to be used in a given context. In EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence, a proper nounA proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
, or a proper adjectiveIn English usage, a proper adjective is an adjective that takes an initial capital letter. A common adjective is an adjective that is not a proper adjective...
, and for initials or abbreviationAn abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase...
s. The first-person pronoun "I" and the interjection "O" are also capitalized. Lower-case letters are normally used for all other purposes. There are however situations where further capitalization may be used to give added emphasis, for example in headings and titles or to pick out certain words (often using small capitals). There are also a few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalization of the first letter. Other languages vary in their use of capitals. For example, in GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
the first letter of all nouns is capitalized, while in Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
the names of days of the week, months of the year, and adjectives of nationality, religion and so on generally begin with a lower-case letter.
Case comparison
Here is a comparison of the majuscule and minuscule versions of each letter used in the English language. The exact representation will vary according to the fontIn typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
used.
| Upper Case: |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
| Lower Case: |
a |
b |
c |
d |
e |
f |
g |
h |
i |
j |
k |
l |
m |
n |
o |
p |
q |
r |
s |
t |
u |
v |
w |
x |
y |
z |
History
{{unreferenced section|date=September 2011}}
Originally alphabetAn alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
s were written entirely in capital letters, spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. When written quickly with a penA pen is a device used to apply ink to a surface, usually paper, for writing or drawing. Historically, reed pens, quill pens, and dip pens were used, with a nib of some sort to be dipped in the ink. Ruling pens allow precise adjustment of line width, and still find a few specialized uses, but...
, these tended to turn into rounder and much simpler forms, like uncialUncial is a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Uncial letters are written in either Greek, Latin, or Gothic.-Development:...
s. It is from these that the first minuscule hands developed, the half-uncials and cursive minuscule, which no longer stay bound between a pair of lines. These in turn formed the foundations for the Carolingian minusculeCarolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200...
script, developed by AlcuinAlcuin of York or Ealhwine, nicknamed Albinus or Flaccus was an English scholar, ecclesiastic, poet and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York...
for use in the court of CharlemagneCharlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...
, which quickly spread across Europe.
European languages, except for Ancient GreekAncient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
and LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, did not make the case distinction before about 1300. In Latin, papyrii from HerculaneumHerculaneum was an ancient Roman town destroyed by volcanic pyroclastic flows in AD 79, located in the territory of the current commune of Ercolano, in the Italian region of Campania in the shadow of Mt...
dating before 79 have been found which include lower-case letters a, b, d, h, p, and r. According to papyrologist Knut Kleve, "The theory, then, that the lower-case letters have been developed from the fifth century uncials and the ninth century Carolingian miniscules seems to be wrong."
Both "majuscule" and "minuscule" letters existed, but the printing pressA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
had not yet been invented, and a given handwritten document could use either one size/style or the other. However, before about 1700 literacyLiteracy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
was very low in Europe and the AmericasThe Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
, hence even handwriting was not used or understood by more than about 1% of people{{citation needed|date=September 2011}}. Therefore, there was not any motivation to use both upper case and lower case letters in the same document as all documents were used by only a small number of scholars.
The timeline of writing in Western Europe can be divided into four eras:
- Greek majuscule (9th – 3rd century B.C.) in contrast to the Greek uncial script (3rd century B.C. – 12 century A.D.) and the later Greek minuscule
- Roman majuscule
Roman square capitals, also called capitalis monumentalis, inscriptional capitals, elegant capitals and quadrata, are an ancient Roman form of writing, and the basis for modern capital letters....
(7th century B.C. – 4th century A.D.) in contrast to the Roman uncial (4th – 8th century B.C.), Roman Half Uncial, and minuscule
- Carolingian
The Carolingian dynasty was a Frankish noble family with origins in the Arnulfing and Pippinid clans of the 7th century AD. The name "Carolingian", Medieval Latin karolingi, an altered form of an unattested Old High German *karling, kerling The Carolingian dynasty (known variously as the...
majuscule (4th – 8th century A.D.) in contrast to the Carolingian minusculeCarolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200...
(around 780 – 12th century)
- Gothic
The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language, created in the 4th century by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Christian Bible....
majuscule (13th and 14th century), in contrast to the early Gothic (end of 11th to 13th century), Gothic (14th century), and late Gothic (16th century) minuscules.
Traditionally, certain letters were rendered differently according to a set of rules. In particular, those letters that began sentences or nouns were made larger and often written in a distinct script. There was no fixed capitalization system until the early 18th century. The English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
eventually dropped the rule for nouns, while the German languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
kept it.
Similar developments have taken place in other alphabets. The lower-case script for the Greek alphabetThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
has its origins in the 7th century and acquired its quadrilinear form in the 8th century. Over time, uncial letter forms were increasingly mixed into the script. The earliest dated Greek lower-case text is the Uspenski GospelsUspenski Gospels, Minuscule 461 , ε 92 , are a New Testament minuscule manuscript written in Greek, dated at 835 AD...
(MS 461) in the year 835{{citation needed|date=September 2011}}. The modern practice of capitalizing the first letter of every sentence seems to be imported (and is rarely used when printing Ancient Greek materials even today).
The Samaritan alphabetThe Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic....
also had lower-case letters, making it relatively unusual among abjadAn abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
s such as HebrewThe Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
, SyriacThe Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC . It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Aramaic alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and the traditional Mongolian alphabets.-...
and ArabicThe Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
, which tend to be written without case.
Terminology
{{contradict|on the origin of the term "upper case"|date=April 2011}}
The term lower case originated in the early days of the printing pressA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
used with movable typeMovable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
in letterpress printingLetterpress printing is relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image...
. The individual type blocks used in hand typesettingTypesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
are stored in shallow wooden or metal drawers, known as cases, with subdivisions into compartments known as boxes to store each individual letter. In many countries the majuscules and minuscules are stored separately, with a pair of boxes for each typefaceIn typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
at a specific size. For typesetting, the two cases are taken out of the storage rack and placed on a rack on the compositor's desk. By convention, the case containing the capitals (and small capitals) stands at a steeper angle at the back of the desk, with the case for the small letters, punctuation and spaces, at a shallower angle below it to the front of the desk, hence upper and lower case. The term "upper case" is a backformation and not used by printers to classify capital letters.{{Citation needed|date=April 2011}} The upper case contained accented letters, numbers and capital ligatures in addition to capital letters and comes from the antique age of setting type for printing presses, when printers kept the type for these letters in the upper drawers of a desk or in the upper type caseA type case is a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing....
, while keeping the type for the more frequently-used smaller letters in the lower type case within easy reach.
Various patterns of cases are available, often with the compartments for lower-case letters varying in size according to the frequency of use of letters, so that the commonest letters are grouped together in larger boxes at the centre of the case. The compositor takes the letter blocks from the compartments and places them in a composing stickIn letterpress printing and typesetting, a composing stick is an instrument used to assemble pieces of metal type into words and lines which are later bound into a forme, set in a galley and printed...
, working from left to right and placing the letters upside down with the nick to the top, then sets the assembled type in a galleyIn printing and publishing, proofs are the preliminary versions of publications meant for review by authors, editors, and proofreaders, often with extra wide margins. Galley proofs may be uncut and unbound, or in some cases electronic...
.
The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Advanced Proportional Principles (reprinted 1952) indicates that this usage of "case" (as the box or frame used by a compositor in the printing trade) was first used in 1588. Originally one large case was used for each typeface, then "divided cases", pairs of cases for upper and lower case, were introduced in the region of today's Belgium by 1563, England by 1588, and France before 1723. Though pairs of cases were used in English-speaking countries and many European countries in Germany and Scandinavia the single case continued in use.
For paleographers, a majuscule script is any script in which the letters have very few or very short ascenders and descenders, or none at all (for example, the majuscule scripts used in the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, or the Book of KellsThe Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. It was created by Celtic monks ca. 800 or slightly earlier...
).
The word minuscule is often spelled miniscule, by association with the unrelated word miniature and the prefix mini-. This has traditionally been regarded as a spelling mistake (since minuscule is derived from the word minus), but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a nonstandard or variant spelling. However, miniscule is still less likely to be used for lower-case letters.
Other forms of case
The distinction between hiraganais a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
and katakanais a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
in Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
is similar to, but not the same as, case; it may also be considered analogous to upright and italics characters. While each sound has both a hiragana and katakana, any given word will use only one of the two scripts normally. If a word is written with hiragana, it is not normally considered correct to write it with katakana, and vice versa. However, katakana may be substituted for hiraganais a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
or kanjiKanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
to add emphasis or make them stand out, similar to the use of capitalization or italicsIn typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.- Methods and use :...
in English.
Also similar to case is recent usage in GeorgianThe Georgian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Georgian language and other Kartvelian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus such as Ossetic and Abkhaz during the 1940s...
, where some authors use isolated letters from the Asomtavruli alphabet within a text otherwise written in Mkhedruli in a fashion that is reminiscent of modern usage of letter case in the LatinThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, GreekThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
, and Cyrillic alphabetThe Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
s.
Usage
In scripts with a case distinction, lower case is generally used for the majority of text; capitals are used for capitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
, acronyms, medial capitalsCamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
, and emphasisIn typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.- Methods and use :...
(in some languages).
Capital letters were sometimes used for typographical emphasis in text made on a typewriter. However, long spans of Latin-alphabet text in all upper-case are harder to read because of the absence of the ascenders and descenderIn typography, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. The line that descenders reach down to is known as the beard line....
s found in lower-case letters, which can aid recognition. With the advent of modern computer editing technology and the InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, emphasis is usually indicated by use of a single word CapitalCapitals is a serif font composed entirely of capital letters. Capitals was one of the available operating system fonts that could be applied to the Macintosh operating system using the Appearance Manager....
, italicIn typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
, or bold font, similar to what has long been common practice in print. In typesetting, when an acronym or initialism requires a string of upper-case letters, it is frequently set in small capitals, to avoid overemphasizing the word in mostly lower-case running text. In electronic communicationsThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, it is often considered very poor "netiquetteNetiquette is a set of social conventions that facilitate interaction over networks, ranging from Usenet and mailing lists to blogs and forums. These rules were described in IETF RFC 1855. However, like many Internet phenomena, the concept and its application remain in a state of flux, and vary...
" to type in all capitalsIn typography, all caps refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters. All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines...
, because it can be harder to read and because it is seen as tantamount to shouting. Indeed, this is the oft-used name for the practice. Larry TraskRobert Lawrence "Larry" Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and an authority on the Basque language and historical linguistics....
states that "it is possible to write an entire word or phrase in capital letters in order to emphasize it", but adds that "on the whole, though, it is preferable to express emphasis, not with capital letters, but with italics."
CapitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
is the writingWriting is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
of a wordIn language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
with its first letter in uppercase and the remaining letters in lowercase. Capitalization rules vary by languageLanguage may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
and are often quite complex, but in most modern languages that have capitalization, the first word of every sentenceIn the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
is capitalized, as are all proper nounA proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
s. Some languages, such as GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, capitalize the first letter of all nouns; this was previously common in EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
as well. (See the article on capitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
for a detailed list of norms).
In English, a variety of case styles are used in various circumstances:
- Capitalization in English, in terms of the general orthographic rules independent of context (e.g., title vs heading vs text), is universally standardized for formal writing. For example, it is universal to begin a sentence with a cap, and to cap proper nouns, wherever formal orthography is in force. (Informal communication, such as texting, IM, or a handwritten sticky note, may not bother, of course; but that's because its users usually do not expect it to be formal.)
- Sentence case: The most common in English prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
. Generally equivalent to the baseline universal standard of formal English orthography mentioned above; that is, only the first word is capitalized, except for proper nounA proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
s and other words which are generally capitalized by a more specific rule.
- Title case: All words are capitalized except for certain subsets defined by rules that are not universally standardized. The standardization is only at the level of house styles and individual style manuals. (See further explanation below at Headings and publication titles.)
- ALL CAPS
In typography, all caps refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters. All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines...
: Only capital letters are used.
-
{{About||the minimalist musical sub-genre|Lowercase (music)|New Testament minuscules|:Category:Greek New Testament minuscules}}
In orthographyThe orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
and typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, letter case (or just case) is the distinction between the larger majuscule (capital, caps, upper-case, upper case, or uppercase) and smaller minuscule (lower-case, etc.) letters. The term originated with the shallow drawers called type caseA type case is a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing....
s still used to hold the movable typeMovable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
for letterpress printingLetterpress printing is relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image...
.
In the Roman alphabet, majuscules (icon or ˈ) are A, B, C, etc.; minuscules are a, b, c, etc.
Most occidentalWestern culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
languages (certainly those based on the LatinThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, CyrillicThe Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
, GreekThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
, Armenian alphabetThe Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. It was devised by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader, and contained originally 36 letters. Two more letters, օ and ֆ, were added in the Middle Ages...
s, and Coptic alphabetThe Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language...
s) use multiple letter-cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. Scripts using two separate cases are also called "bicameral scripts". Many other writing systemA writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
s (such as those used in the Georgian languageThe Georgian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Georgian language and other Kartvelian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus such as Ossetic and Abkhaz during the 1940s...
, GlagoliticThe Glagolitic alphabet , also known as Glagolitsa, is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. The name was not coined until many centuries after its creation, and comes from the Old Slavic glagolъ "utterance" . The verb glagoliti means "to speak"...
, ArabicThe Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
, HebrewThe Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
, and DevanagariDevanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
) make no distinction between capital and lowercase letters – a system called unicaseA unicase or unicameral alphabet is one that has no case for its letters. Tamil, Arabic, Old Hungarian, Hebrew, Georgian and Hangul are unicase alphabets, while Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian have two cases for each letter, e.g., B/b, Β/β, Б/б,...
. If an alphabet has case, all or nearly all letters have both forms. Both forms in each pair are considered to be the same letter: they have the same name, same pronunciation, and will be treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order. An example of a letter without both forms is the German ßIn the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...
(ess-tsett), which exists only in minuscule. When capitalized it normally becomes two letters ("SS"), but the ß letter may be used as a capital to prevent confusion in special cases, such as names. This is because ß was originally a ligatureIn writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms", where the specific shape of a letter depends on...
of the two letters "ſs" (a long sThe long, medial or descending s is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example "ſinfulneſs" . The modern letterform was called the terminal, round, or short s.-History:The long s is derived from the old Roman cursive...
and an s), both of which become "S" when capitalized. It later evolved into a letter in its own right. (ß is also occasionally referred to as a ligature of "sz", which recalls the way this consonant was pronounced in some medieval German dialects. The original spelling sz is preserved in HungarianHungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
and pronounced [s].)
Languages have capitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
rules to determine whether majuscules or minuscules are to be used in a given context. In EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence, a proper nounA proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
, or a proper adjectiveIn English usage, a proper adjective is an adjective that takes an initial capital letter. A common adjective is an adjective that is not a proper adjective...
, and for initials or abbreviationAn abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase...
s. The first-person pronoun "I" and the interjection "O" are also capitalized. Lower-case letters are normally used for all other purposes. There are however situations where further capitalization may be used to give added emphasis, for example in headings and titles or to pick out certain words (often using small capitals). There are also a few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalization of the first letter. Other languages vary in their use of capitals. For example, in GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
the first letter of all nouns is capitalized, while in Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
the names of days of the week, months of the year, and adjectives of nationality, religion and so on generally begin with a lower-case letter.
Case comparison
Here is a comparison of the majuscule and minuscule versions of each letter used in the English language. The exact representation will vary according to the fontIn typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
used.
| Upper Case: |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
| Lower Case: |
a |
b |
c |
d |
e |
f |
g |
h |
i |
j |
k |
l |
m |
n |
o |
p |
q |
r |
s |
t |
u |
v |
w |
x |
y |
z |
History
{{unreferenced section|date=September 2011}}
Originally alphabetAn alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
s were written entirely in capital letters, spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. When written quickly with a penA pen is a device used to apply ink to a surface, usually paper, for writing or drawing. Historically, reed pens, quill pens, and dip pens were used, with a nib of some sort to be dipped in the ink. Ruling pens allow precise adjustment of line width, and still find a few specialized uses, but...
, these tended to turn into rounder and much simpler forms, like uncialUncial is a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Uncial letters are written in either Greek, Latin, or Gothic.-Development:...
s. It is from these that the first minuscule hands developed, the half-uncials and cursive minuscule, which no longer stay bound between a pair of lines. These in turn formed the foundations for the Carolingian minusculeCarolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200...
script, developed by AlcuinAlcuin of York or Ealhwine, nicknamed Albinus or Flaccus was an English scholar, ecclesiastic, poet and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York...
for use in the court of CharlemagneCharlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...
, which quickly spread across Europe.
European languages, except for Ancient GreekAncient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
and LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, did not make the case distinction before about 1300. In Latin, papyrii from HerculaneumHerculaneum was an ancient Roman town destroyed by volcanic pyroclastic flows in AD 79, located in the territory of the current commune of Ercolano, in the Italian region of Campania in the shadow of Mt...
dating before 79 have been found which include lower-case letters a, b, d, h, p, and r. According to papyrologist Knut Kleve, "The theory, then, that the lower-case letters have been developed from the fifth century uncials and the ninth century Carolingian miniscules seems to be wrong."
Both "majuscule" and "minuscule" letters existed, but the printing pressA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
had not yet been invented, and a given handwritten document could use either one size/style or the other. However, before about 1700 literacyLiteracy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
was very low in Europe and the AmericasThe Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
, hence even handwriting was not used or understood by more than about 1% of people{{citation needed|date=September 2011}}. Therefore, there was not any motivation to use both upper case and lower case letters in the same document as all documents were used by only a small number of scholars.
The timeline of writing in Western Europe can be divided into four eras:
- Greek majuscule (9th – 3rd century B.C.) in contrast to the Greek uncial script (3rd century B.C. – 12 century A.D.) and the later Greek minuscule
- Roman majuscule
Roman square capitals, also called capitalis monumentalis, inscriptional capitals, elegant capitals and quadrata, are an ancient Roman form of writing, and the basis for modern capital letters....
(7th century B.C. – 4th century A.D.) in contrast to the Roman uncial (4th – 8th century B.C.), Roman Half Uncial, and minuscule
- Carolingian
The Carolingian dynasty was a Frankish noble family with origins in the Arnulfing and Pippinid clans of the 7th century AD. The name "Carolingian", Medieval Latin karolingi, an altered form of an unattested Old High German *karling, kerling The Carolingian dynasty (known variously as the...
majuscule (4th – 8th century A.D.) in contrast to the Carolingian minusculeCarolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200...
(around 780 – 12th century)
- Gothic
The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language, created in the 4th century by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Christian Bible....
majuscule (13th and 14th century), in contrast to the early Gothic (end of 11th to 13th century), Gothic (14th century), and late Gothic (16th century) minuscules.
Traditionally, certain letters were rendered differently according to a set of rules. In particular, those letters that began sentences or nouns were made larger and often written in a distinct script. There was no fixed capitalization system until the early 18th century. The English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
eventually dropped the rule for nouns, while the German languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
kept it.
Similar developments have taken place in other alphabets. The lower-case script for the Greek alphabetThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
has its origins in the 7th century and acquired its quadrilinear form in the 8th century. Over time, uncial letter forms were increasingly mixed into the script. The earliest dated Greek lower-case text is the Uspenski GospelsUspenski Gospels, Minuscule 461 , ε 92 , are a New Testament minuscule manuscript written in Greek, dated at 835 AD...
(MS 461) in the year 835{{citation needed|date=September 2011}}. The modern practice of capitalizing the first letter of every sentence seems to be imported (and is rarely used when printing Ancient Greek materials even today).
The Samaritan alphabetThe Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic....
also had lower-case letters, making it relatively unusual among abjadAn abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
s such as HebrewThe Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
, SyriacThe Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC . It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Aramaic alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and the traditional Mongolian alphabets.-...
and ArabicThe Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
, which tend to be written without case.
Terminology
{{contradict|on the origin of the term "upper case"|date=April 2011}}
The term lower case originated in the early days of the printing pressA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
used with movable typeMovable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
in letterpress printingLetterpress printing is relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image...
. The individual type blocks used in hand typesettingTypesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
are stored in shallow wooden or metal drawers, known as cases, with subdivisions into compartments known as boxes to store each individual letter. In many countries the majuscules and minuscules are stored separately, with a pair of boxes for each typefaceIn typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
at a specific size. For typesetting, the two cases are taken out of the storage rack and placed on a rack on the compositor's desk. By convention, the case containing the capitals (and small capitals) stands at a steeper angle at the back of the desk, with the case for the small letters, punctuation and spaces, at a shallower angle below it to the front of the desk, hence upper and lower case. The term "upper case" is a backformation and not used by printers to classify capital letters.{{Citation needed|date=April 2011}} The upper case contained accented letters, numbers and capital ligatures in addition to capital letters and comes from the antique age of setting type for printing presses, when printers kept the type for these letters in the upper drawers of a desk or in the upper type caseA type case is a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing....
, while keeping the type for the more frequently-used smaller letters in the lower type case within easy reach.
Various patterns of cases are available, often with the compartments for lower-case letters varying in size according to the frequency of use of letters, so that the commonest letters are grouped together in larger boxes at the centre of the case. The compositor takes the letter blocks from the compartments and places them in a composing stickIn letterpress printing and typesetting, a composing stick is an instrument used to assemble pieces of metal type into words and lines which are later bound into a forme, set in a galley and printed...
, working from left to right and placing the letters upside down with the nick to the top, then sets the assembled type in a galleyIn printing and publishing, proofs are the preliminary versions of publications meant for review by authors, editors, and proofreaders, often with extra wide margins. Galley proofs may be uncut and unbound, or in some cases electronic...
.
The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Advanced Proportional Principles (reprinted 1952) indicates that this usage of "case" (as the box or frame used by a compositor in the printing trade) was first used in 1588. Originally one large case was used for each typeface, then "divided cases", pairs of cases for upper and lower case, were introduced in the region of today's Belgium by 1563, England by 1588, and France before 1723. Though pairs of cases were used in English-speaking countries and many European countries in Germany and Scandinavia the single case continued in use.
For paleographers, a majuscule script is any script in which the letters have very few or very short ascenders and descenders, or none at all (for example, the majuscule scripts used in the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, or the Book of KellsThe Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. It was created by Celtic monks ca. 800 or slightly earlier...
).
The word minuscule is often spelled miniscule, by association with the unrelated word miniature and the prefix mini-. This has traditionally been regarded as a spelling mistake (since minuscule is derived from the word minus), but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a nonstandard or variant spelling. However, miniscule is still less likely to be used for lower-case letters.
Other forms of case
The distinction between hiraganais a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
and katakanais a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
in Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
is similar to, but not the same as, case; it may also be considered analogous to upright and italics characters. While each sound has both a hiragana and katakana, any given word will use only one of the two scripts normally. If a word is written with hiragana, it is not normally considered correct to write it with katakana, and vice versa. However, katakana may be substituted for hiraganais a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
or kanjiKanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
to add emphasis or make them stand out, similar to the use of capitalization or italicsIn typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.- Methods and use :...
in English.
Also similar to case is recent usage in GeorgianThe Georgian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Georgian language and other Kartvelian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus such as Ossetic and Abkhaz during the 1940s...
, where some authors use isolated letters from the Asomtavruli alphabet within a text otherwise written in Mkhedruli in a fashion that is reminiscent of modern usage of letter case in the LatinThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, GreekThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
, and Cyrillic alphabetThe Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
s.
Usage
In scripts with a case distinction, lower case is generally used for the majority of text; capitals are used for capitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
, acronyms, medial capitalsCamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
, and emphasisIn typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.- Methods and use :...
(in some languages).
Capital letters were sometimes used for typographical emphasis in text made on a typewriter. However, long spans of Latin-alphabet text in all upper-case are harder to read because of the absence of the ascenders and descenderIn typography, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. The line that descenders reach down to is known as the beard line....
s found in lower-case letters, which can aid recognition. With the advent of modern computer editing technology and the InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, emphasis is usually indicated by use of a single word CapitalCapitals is a serif font composed entirely of capital letters. Capitals was one of the available operating system fonts that could be applied to the Macintosh operating system using the Appearance Manager....
, italicIn typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
, or bold font, similar to what has long been common practice in print. In typesetting, when an acronym or initialism requires a string of upper-case letters, it is frequently set in small capitals, to avoid overemphasizing the word in mostly lower-case running text. In electronic communicationsThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, it is often considered very poor "netiquetteNetiquette is a set of social conventions that facilitate interaction over networks, ranging from Usenet and mailing lists to blogs and forums. These rules were described in IETF RFC 1855. However, like many Internet phenomena, the concept and its application remain in a state of flux, and vary...
" to type in all capitalsIn typography, all caps refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters. All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines...
, because it can be harder to read and because it is seen as tantamount to shouting. Indeed, this is the oft-used name for the practice. Larry TraskRobert Lawrence "Larry" Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and an authority on the Basque language and historical linguistics....
states that "it is possible to write an entire word or phrase in capital letters in order to emphasize it", but adds that "on the whole, though, it is preferable to express emphasis, not with capital letters, but with italics."
CapitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
is the writingWriting is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
of a wordIn language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
with its first letter in uppercase and the remaining letters in lowercase. Capitalization rules vary by languageLanguage may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
and are often quite complex, but in most modern languages that have capitalization, the first word of every sentenceIn the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
is capitalized, as are all proper nounA proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
s. Some languages, such as GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, capitalize the first letter of all nouns; this was previously common in EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
as well. (See the article on capitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
for a detailed list of norms).
In English, a variety of case styles are used in various circumstances:
- Capitalization in English, in terms of the general orthographic rules independent of context (e.g., title vs heading vs text), is universally standardized for formal writing. For example, it is universal to begin a sentence with a cap, and to cap proper nouns, wherever formal orthography is in force. (Informal communication, such as texting, IM, or a handwritten sticky note, may not bother, of course; but that's because its users usually do not expect it to be formal.)
- Sentence case: The most common in English prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
. Generally equivalent to the baseline universal standard of formal English orthography mentioned above; that is, only the first word is capitalized, except for proper nounA proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
s and other words which are generally capitalized by a more specific rule.
- Title case: All words are capitalized except for certain subsets defined by rules that are not universally standardized. The standardization is only at the level of house styles and individual style manuals. (See further explanation below at Headings and publication titles.)
- ALL CAPS
In typography, all caps refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters. All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines...
: Only capital letters are used.
- {{smallcaps
In typography, small capitals are uppercase characters set at the same height and weight as surrounding lowercase letters or text figures...
: Capital letters are used which are the size of the lower-case "x"In typography, the x-height or corpus size refers to the distance between the baseline and the mean line in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the letter x in the font , as well as the u, v, w, and z...
. Slightly larger small caps can be used in a {{smallcaps|Mixed Case}} fashion. Used for initialisms, names, mathematical entities, computer commands in printed text, and other situations where a given phrase needs to be distinguished from the main text.
- lowercase only: Sometimes used for artistic effect, such as in poetry. Also commonly seen in computer commands and SMS language
SMS language or textese is a term for the abbreviations and slang most commonly used due to the necessary brevity of mobile phone text messaging, in particular the widespread SMS SMS language or textese (also known as txt-speak, txtese, chatspeak, txt, txtspk, txtk, txto, texting language, txt...
, to avoid pressing the shift keyThe shift key is a modifier key on a keyboard, used to type capital letters and other alternate "upper" characters. There are typically two shift keys, on the left and right sides of the row below the home row...
in order to speed typing.
In some traditional forms of poetry, capitalization has been conventionally used as a marker to indicate the beginning of a line of verseA line is a unit of language into which a poem or play is divided, which operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures, such as the sentence or clauses in sentences...
independent of any other grammatical feature.
Headings and publication titles
In English-language publications, varying conventions are used for capitalizing words in publication titleA title is a prefix or suffix added to someone's name to signify either veneration, an official position or a professional or academic qualification. In some languages, titles may even be inserted between a first and last name...
s and headlineThe headline is the text at the top of a newspaper article, indicating the nature of the article below it.It is sometimes termed a news hed, a deliberate misspelling that dates from production flow during hot type days, to notify the composing room that a written note from an editor concerned a...
s, including chapter and section headings. The rules differ substantially between individual house styles. The main examples are (from most to least capitals used):
| Example |
Rule |
| THE |
VITAMINS |
ARE |
IN |
MY |
FRESH |
CALIFORNIA |
RAISINS |
All-uppercase letters |
| The |
Vitamins |
Are |
In |
My |
Fresh |
California |
Raisins |
"Start case" — capitalization of all words, regardless of the part of speech |
| The |
Vitamins |
Are |
in |
My |
Fresh |
California |
Raisins |
Capitalization of all words, except for articleAn article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
s, prepositions, and conjunctionIn grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. A discourse connective is a conjunction joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each...
s |
| The |
Vitamins |
are |
in |
My |
Fresh |
California |
Raisins |
Capitalization of all words, except for articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and forms of to be |
| The |
Vitamins |
are |
in |
my |
Fresh |
California |
Raisins |
Capitalization of all words, except for closed-class words |
| The |
Vitamins |
are |
in |
my |
fresh |
California |
Raisins |
Capitalization of all noun In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s |
| The |
vitamins |
are |
in |
my |
fresh |
California |
raisins |
Sentence case – Capitalization of only the first word, proper noun A proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
s and as dictated by other specific English rules |
| the |
vitamins |
are |
in |
my |
fresh |
California |
raisins |
Mid-sentence case – capitalization of proper nouns only |
| the |
vitamins |
are |
in |
my |
fresh |
california |
raisins |
All-lowercase letters (unconventional in formal English) |
Among U.S. bookA book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
publishers (but not newspaper publishers), it is a common typographic practice to capitalize "important" words in titles and headings. This is an old form of emphasisIn typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.- Methods and use :...
, similar to the more modern practice of using a larger or boldface font for titles. Most capitalize all words except for closed-class words, or articles, prepositions and conjunctions. Some capitalize longer prepositions such as "between", but not shorter ones. Some capitalize only nouns, others capitalize all words. This family of typographic conventions is usually called title case. Of these various styles, only the practice of capitalizing nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives but not articles, conjunctions or prepositions (though some styles except long prepositions) is considered correct in formal American English writing, according to most style guides, though others are found in less formal settings.
As for whether hyphenated words are capitalized not only at the beginning but also after the hyphen, there is no universal standard; variation occurs in the wild and among house styles (e.g., The Letter-Case Rule in My Book; Short-term Follow-up Care for Burns). Traditional copyediting makes a distinction between "temporary compounds" (such as many nonceNonce may refer to:* Nonce, time being: the present occasion; "for the nonce"* Nonce word, a word used to meet a need that is not expected to recur* Cryptographic nonce, a number or bit string used only once, in security engineering...
[novel instance] compound modifierA compound modifier is a compound of two or more attributive words: That is, more than one word that together modify a noun...
s), in which every word is capped (e.g., How This Particular Author Chose To Style His Autumn-Apple-Picking Heading), and "permanent compounds", which are terms that, although compound and hyphenated, are so well established that dictionaries enter them as headwordA headword, head word, lemma, or sometimes catchword is the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appear. The headword is used to locate the entry, and dictates its alphabetical position...
s (e.g., Short-term Follow-up Care for Burns).
The convention followed by many British publishers (including scientific publishers, like NatureNature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
, magazines, like The EconomistThe Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
and New ScientistNew Scientist is a weekly non-peer-reviewed English-language international science magazine, which since 1996 has also run a website, covering recent developments in science and technology for a general audience. Founded in 1956, it is published by Reed Business Information Ltd, a subsidiary of...
, and newspapers, like The GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
and The TimesThe Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
) is to use sentence-style capitalization in titles and headlines, where capitalization follows the same rules that apply for sentences. This convention is sometimes called sentence case. It is also widely used in the United States, especially in newspaper publishing, bibliographic references and library catalogues. Examples of global publishers whose English-language house styles prescribe sentence-case titles and headings include the International Organization for StandardizationThe International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...
.
In creative typography, such as music record covers and other artistic material, all styles are commonly encountered, including all-lowercase letters and mixed case (StudlyCapsStudlyCaps is a variation of CamelCase in which the individual letters in a word are capitalized and not capitalized, either at random or in some pattern.-History:...
).
Several information technologyInformation technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
products are titled in CamelCaseCamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
, deriving from a computer programmingComputer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...
practice.
One British style guide mentions a form of title case: R.M. Ritter's "Oxford Manual of Style" (2002) suggests capitalizing "the first word and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, but generally not articles, conjunctions and short prepositions".
Computers
Some sentence cases are not used in standard English, but are common in computer programmingComputer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...
, as well as in product branding and in other specialised fields:
- CamelCase
CamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
: First letter of each word is capitalized, spaces and punctuationPunctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...
removed. If the very first letter is capitalized, as in "CamelCase" (or "PowerPoint"), the term "upper camel case" may be used; this is also known as "Pascal case" or "Bumpy case". "Lower camel case" describes a variation, as in "camelCase" (or "iPod" or "eBay"), in which the very first letter is in lower case.
- Start case: First letter of each word capitalized, spaces separate words. All words including short articles and prepositions start with a capital letter. For example: "This Is A Start Case".
- Snake case: punctuation is removed and spaces are replaced by single underscore
The underscore [ _ ] is a character that originally appeared on the typewriter and was primarily used to underline words...
s. Normally the letters share the same case (either UPPER_CASE_EMBEDDED_UNDERSCORE or lower_case_embedded_underscore) but the case can be mixed.
- Studly caps: Mixed case, as in "StUdLyCaPs", with no semantic
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
or syntacticIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
significance to the use of the capitals. Sometimes only vowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s are upper-case, at other times upper and lower case are alternated, but often it is just random. The name comes from the fact that it was used to imply coolness on the part of the writer, although nowadays it is more often used ironicallyIrony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
. (It is also used to mock the violation of standard English case conventions by marketers in the naming of computer software packages, even when there is no technical requirement to do so—e.g., Sun MicrosystemsSun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
' naming of a windowing system NeWSNeWS was a windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1980s. Originally known as "SunDew", its primary authors were James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal...
.)
Case folding
The conversion of letter case in a stringIn formal languages, which are used in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, a string is a finite sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set or alphabet....
is common practice in computer applications, for instance to make case-insensitive comparisons. Many high-level programming languages provide simple methods for case folding, at least for the ASCIIThe American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
character set.
In word processing
Most modern word processorA word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
s provide automated case folding with a simple click or keystroke. For example, in Microsoft Office Word, there is a dialog box for toggling the selected text through UPPERCASE, then lowercase, then Title Case (actually start caps; exception words must be lowercased individually). The keystroke shift-F3 does the same thing.
Adding another option, "smart title case", in which certain classes of words would be exceptions and remain lowercase, is an obvious opportunity for feature improvement in future versions. Although some words would inevitably be borderline members of the exception subset and could be ignored (e.g., long prepositions such as without and between]), there is a core population of words that everyone can agree should be programmed to remain lowercase (e.g., a, an, the, of, for).
In programming
In some forms of BASICBASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
there are two methods for case folding:
UpperA$ = UCASE$("a")
LowerA$ = LCASE$("A")
CC is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
and C++C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
, as well as any C-like language that conforms to its standard libraryThe C Standard Library is the standard library for the programming language C, as specified in the ANSI C standard.. It was developed at the same time as the C POSIX library, which is basically a superset of it...
, provide these functions in the file ctype.hC character classification is an operation provided by a group of functions in the ANSI C Standard Library for the C programming language. These functions are used to test characters for membership in a particular class of characters, such as alphabetic characters, control characters, etc...
:
char upperA = toupper('a');
char lowerA = tolower('A');
Case folding is different with different character sets. In ASCIIThe American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
or EBCDICExtended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems....
, case can be folded in the following way, in C:
#define toupper(c) (islower(c) ? (c) - 'a' + 'A' : (c))
#define tolower(c) (isupper(c) ? (c) - 'A' + 'a' : (c))
This only works because the letters of upper and lower cases are spaced out equally. In ASCII they are consecutive, whereas with EBCDIC they are not; nonetheless the upper case letters are arranged in the same pattern and with the same gaps as are the lower case letters, so the technique still works.
Some computer programming languages offer facilities for converting text to a form in which all words are first-letter capitalized. Visual BasicVisual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...
calls this "proper case"; PythonPython is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
calls it "title case". This differs from usual title casing conventions, such as the English convention in which minor words are not capitalized.
Unicode case folding and script identification
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
defines case folding through the three case-mapping properties of each character: uppercase, lowercase and titlecase. These properties relate all characters in scripts with differing cases to the other case variants of the character.
As briefly discussed in UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
Technical Note #26, "In terms of implementation issues, any attempt at a unification of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic would wreak havoc [and] make casing operations an unholy mess, in effect making all casing operations context sensitive [...]". In other words, while the shapes of letters like A, B, E, H, K, M, O, P, T, X, Y and so on are shared between the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets (and small differences in their canonical forms may be considered to be of a merely typographicalTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
nature), it would still be problematic for a multilingual character set or a fontIn typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
to provide only a single codepoint for, say, uppercase letter B, as this would make it quite difficult for a wordprocessor to change that single uppercase letter to one of the three different choices for the lower case letter, b (Latin), β (Greek), or в (Cyrillic). Without letter case, a 'unified European alphabet'—such as ABБCГDΔΕZЄЗFΦGHIИJ...Z, with an appropriate subset for each language—is feasible; but considering letter case, it becomes very clear that these alphabets are rather distinct sets of symbols.
Special cases
- The German letter ß
In the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...
exists only in lowercase (but see Capital ßCapital sharp s is the contestable majuscule of eszett. Sharp s is nearly unique among the letters of the Latin alphabet in that it has no traditional upper case form . This is because it never occurs initially in German text, and traditional German printing never used all-caps...
), and is capitalized as "SS".
- The Greek letter Σ
Sigma is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and carries the 'S' sound. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 200. When used at the end of a word, and the word is not all upper case, the final form is used, e.g...
has two different lowercase forms: "ς" in word-final position and "σ" elsewhere.
- The Cyrillic letter Ӏ
Palochka is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. This letter usually has only a capital form, which is also used in lowercase text. The capital form of Palochka often looks like the capital form of the Cyrillic letter Dotted I , the capital form of the Latin letter I , and the lowercase form of the...
usually has only a capital form, which is also used in lowercase text.
- Unlike most Latin-script languages that use uppercase "I" and lowercase "i", Turkish
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
has dotted and dotless I independent of case.
Related phenomena
Similar orthographic conventions are used for emphasis or following language-specific rules, including:
- Font
In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
effects such as italic typeIn typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
or oblique typeOblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used in the same manner as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except distorted...
, boldface, and choice of serifIn typography, serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface with serifs is called a serif typeface . A typeface without serifs is called sans serif or sans-serif, from the French sans, meaning “without”...
vs. sans-serifIn typography, a sans-serif, sans serif or san serif typeface is one that does not have the small projecting features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without"....
- Typographical conventions in mathematical formulae
Typographical conventions in mathematical formulae provide uniformity across mathematical texts and help the readers of those texts to grasp new concepts quickly....
include the use of Greek letters and the use of Latin letters with formatting such as blackboard boldBlackboard bold is a typeface style that is often used for certain symbols in mathematical texts, in which certain lines of the symbol are doubled. The symbols usually denote number sets...
and blackletterBlackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
- Choice of character set, for example switching between kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
, hiraganais a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
, katakanais a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
, and rōmaji in the Japanese writing systemThe modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:*Kanji, adopted Chinese characters*Kana, a pair of syllabaries , consisting of:...
.
See also
- All caps
In typography, all caps refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters. All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines...
- CamelCase
CamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
- Capitalization
Capitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
- Case folding
- Roman cursive
Roman cursive is a form of handwriting used in ancient Rome and to some extent into the Middle Ages. It is customarily divided into old cursive, and new cursive.- Old Roman cursive :...
- Roman square capitals
Roman square capitals, also called capitalis monumentalis, inscriptional capitals, elegant capitals and quadrata, are an ancient Roman form of writing, and the basis for modern capital letters....
- Sentence case
- Shift key
The shift key is a modifier key on a keyboard, used to type capital letters and other alternate "upper" characters. There are typically two shift keys, on the left and right sides of the row below the home row...
- Small caps
In typography, small capitals are uppercase characters set at the same height and weight as surrounding lowercase letters or text figures...
- StudlyCaps
StudlyCaps is a variation of CamelCase in which the individual letters in a word are capitalized and not capitalized, either at random or in some pattern.-History:...
- Unicase
A unicase or unicameral alphabet is one that has no case for its letters. Tamil, Arabic, Old Hungarian, Hebrew, Georgian and Hangul are unicase alphabets, while Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian have two cases for each letter, e.g., B/b, Β/β, Б/б,...
External links
{{Wiktionary|capital letter}}
{{Wiktionary|minuscule|lowercase}}
{{Commons category-inline|Capital letters}}
{{Typography terms}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Letter Case}}