thumb|159px|The lower-case "a" and upper-case "A" are the two case variants of the first letter in the [[English alphabet.]]
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally majuscule) and smaller lowercase (more formally minuscule) in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size (e.g. ), but for others the shapes are different (e.g., ). The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.
Letter case is generally applied in a mixed-case fashion, with both upper and lowercase letters appearing in a given piece of text for legibility. The choice of case is often denoted by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular discipline. In orthography, the uppercase is reserved for special purposes, such as the first letter of a sentence or of a proper noun (called capitalisation, or capitalised words), which makes lowercase more common in regular text.
In some contexts, it is conventional to use one case only. For example, engineering design drawings are typically labelled entirely in uppercase letters, which are easier to distinguish individually than the lowercase when space restrictions require very small lettering. In mathematics, on the other hand, uppercase and lowercase letters denote generally different mathematical objects, which may be related when the two types of cases of the same letter are used; for example, may denote an element of a set .
Terminology
The terms upper case and lower case may be written as two consecutive words, connected with a hyphen (upper-case and lower-caseparticularly if they pre-modify another noun),
Majuscule <span class="anchor" id="Upper case"></span><span class="anchor" id="Upper Case"></span>
Majuscule (, less commonly ), for palaeographers, is technically any script whose letters have no or very few ascenders and descenders (for example, the majuscule scripts used in the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, or the Book of Kells). Consequently, all of the letters of a majuscule script are of roughly the same height and it is written within the space of just two (imaginary or real) parallel lines. This is contrasted with the four lines required by a minuscule script, on which see below. While majuscule scripts were originally used to write entire texts, their letters eventually came to be used primarily with the modern function of uppercase letters in European writing, so the term may sometimes be used as a synonym of 'uppercase letter' or 'capital' in contemporary contexts.
Minuscule <span class="anchor" id="Lower case"></span><span class="anchor" id="Lower Case"></span>
Minuscule refers to lower-case letters. In paleography, the term refers to a script which includes letters of different heights, with ascenders and descenders, so it needs to be written within a space of four (imaginary or real) parallel lines. are the letters with ascenders, and g, j, p, q, y are the ones with descenders. In addition, with old-style numerals still used by some traditional or classical fonts, 6 and 8 make up the ascender set, and 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 the descender set.
Bicameral script
thumb|250px|[[Handwritten Cyrillic script]]
thumb|250px|[[Adyghe language|Adyghe Latin alphabet, used between 1927 and 1938, was based on Latin script, but did not have capital letters, being unicameral (small caps include ᴀ, ʙ, ᴣ, ʀ, , ᴘ, and x8px.]]
A minority of writing systems use two separate cases. Such writing systems are called bicameral scripts. These scripts include the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Glagolitic, Adlam, Warang Citi, Old Hungarian, Garay, Zaghawa, Osage, Vithkuqi, and Deseret scripts. Languages written in these scripts use letter cases as an aid to clarity. The Georgian alphabet has several variants, and there were attempts to use them as different cases, but the modern written Georgian language does not distinguish case.
All other writing systems make no distinction between majuscules and minuscules a system called unicameral script or unicase. This includes most syllabic and other non-alphabetic scripts.
In scripts with a case distinction, lowercase is generally used for the majority of text; capitals are used for capitalisation and emphasis when boldface is not available. Acronyms (and particularly initialisms) are often written in all-caps, depending on various factors.
Capitalisation
Capitalisation is the writing of a word with its first letter in uppercase and the remaining letters in lowercase. Capitalisation rules vary by language and are often quite complex, but in most modern languages that have capitalisation, the first word of every sentence is capitalised, as are all proper nouns.
Capitalisation in English, in terms of the general orthographic rules independent of context (e.g. title vs. heading vs. text), is universally standardised for formal writing. Capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence, a proper noun, or a proper adjective. The names of the days of the week and the names of the months are also capitalised, as are the first-person pronoun "I" and the vocative particle "O". There are a few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalisation of the first letter. Honorifics and personal titles showing rank or prestige are capitalised when used together with the name of the person (for example, "Mr. Smith", "Bishop Gorman", "Professor Moore") or as a direct address, but normally not when used alone and in a more general sense. It can also be seen as customary to capitalise any word in some contexts even a pronoun referring to a deity.
Other words normally start with a lower-case letter. There are, however, situations where further capitalisation may be used to give added emphasis, for example in headings and publication titles (see below). In some traditional forms of poetry, capitalisation has conventionally been used as a marker to indicate the beginning of a line of verse independent of any grammatical feature. In political writing, parody and satire, the unexpected emphasis afforded by otherwise ill-advised capitalisation is often used to great stylistic effect, such as in the case of George Orwell's Big Brother.
Other languages vary in their use of capitals. For example, in German all nouns are capitalised (this was previously common in English as well, mainly in the 17th and 18th centuries), while in Romance and most other European languages the names of the days of the week, the names of the months, and adjectives of nationality, religion, and so on normally begin with a lower-case letter. On the other hand, in some languages it is customary to capitalise formal polite pronouns, for example , (Danish), , (German), and or (short for in Spanish).
Informal communication, such as texting, instant messaging or a handwritten sticky note, may not bother to follow the conventions concerning capitalisation, but that is because its users usually do not expect it to be formal.
- The Greek upper-case letter "Σ" has two different lower-case forms: "ς" in word-final position and "σ" elsewhere. In a similar manner, the Latin lower-case letter "S" used to have two different lower-case forms: "s" in word-final position and "<big> ſ </big>" elsewhere. The latter form, called the long s, fell out of general use before the middle of the 19th century, except in countries that continued to use blackletter typefaces such as Fraktur. When blackletter type fell out of general use in the mid-20th century, even those countries dropped the long s.
- The treatment of the Greek iota subscript with upper-case letters is complicated.
- Unlike most languages that use Latin-script and link the dotless upper-case "I" with the dotted lower-case "i", Turkish, Tatar, Crimean Tatar and Azeri in Azerbaijan have both a dotted and dotless I, each in both upper and lower case. The two pairs ("<big>İ/i</big>" and "<big>I/ı</big>") represent distinct phonemes.
- In some languages, specific digraphs may be regarded as single letters, and in Dutch, the digraph "IJ/ij" is even capitalised with both components written in uppercase (for example, "IJsland" rather than "Ijsland").
- Some English surnames, such as fforbes, are traditionally spelt with a digraph instead of a capital letter (at least for ff).
- In the Hawaiian orthography, the okina is a phonemic symbol that visually resembles a left single quotation mark. Representing the glottal stop, the okina can be characterised as either a letter or a diacritic. As a unicase letter, the okina is unaffected by capitalisation; it is the following letter that is capitalised instead.
Related features
Similar orthographic and graphostylistic conventions are used for emphasis or following language-specific or other rules, including:
- Font effects such as italic type or oblique type, boldface, and choice of serif vs. sans-serif.
- In mathematical notation lower-case and upper-case letters have generally different meanings, and other meanings can be implied by the use of other typefaces, such as boldface, fraktur, script typeface, and blackboard bold.
- Some letters of the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets and some jamo of the Korean hangul have different forms depending on placement within a word, but these rules are strict and the different forms cannot be used for emphasis.
- In the Arabic and Arabic-based alphabets, letters in a word are connected, except for several that cannot connect to the following letter. Letters may have distinct forms depending on whether they are initial (connected only to the following letter), medial (connected to both neighboring letters), final (connected only to the preceding letter), or isolated (connected to neither a preceding nor a following letter).
- In the Hebrew alphabet, five letters have a distinct form (see Final form) that is used when they are word-final.
- In Georgian, some authors use isolated letters from the ancient Asomtavruli alphabet within a text otherwise written in the modern Mkhedruli in a fashion that is reminiscent of the usage of upper-case letters in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets.
- In the Japanese writing system, an author has the option of switching between kanji, hiragana, katakana, and rōmaji. In particular, every hiragana character has an equivalent katakana character, and vice versa. Romanised Japanese sometimes uses lowercase letters to represent words that would be written in hiragana, and uppercase letters to represent words that would be written in katakana. Some kana characters are written in smaller type when they modify or combine with the preceding sign (yōon) or the following sign (sokuon).
Stylistic or specialised usage
thumb|182px|Alternating all-caps and headline styles at the start of a [[The New York Times|New York Times report published in November 1919. (The event reported is Arthur Eddington's test of Einstein's theory of general relativity.)]]
In English, a variety of case styles are used in various circumstances:
; Sentence case
: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"<br /> A mixed-case style in which the first word of the sentence is capitalised, as well as proper nouns and other words as required by a more specific rule. This is generally equivalent to the baseline universal standard of formal English orthography.
; Substantive capitalization
: "The quick brown Fox jumps over the lazy Dog"<br /> A historical style, common in the 17th and 18th centuries, where all nouns (substantives) are capitalised to denote their importance or "substance" in the sentence. This style remains the standard in modern German orthography.
; Rhetorical capitalization
: "The Quick Brown Fox jumps over the Lazy Dog"<br /> A stylistic choice, often found in poetry (such as the works of Emily Dickinson), where specific words are capitalised to provide emphasis, intensity, or symbolic weight, regardless of their part of speech. It acts as a visual cue for the reader to pause or prioritize a specific concept.
; Title case (capital case, headline style)
: "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps over<!-- yes, 'over', not 'Over' in this case (but yes in the next case) --> the Lazy Dog"<br /> A mixed-case style with all words capitalised, except for certain subsets (particularly articles and short prepositions and conjunctions) defined by rules that are not universally standardised. The standardisation is only at the level of house styles and individual style manuals.
; Start case (first letter of each word capitalized)
: "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog"<br /> Start case, initial caps or proper case is a simplified variant of title case. In text processing, start case usually involves the capitalisation of all words irrespective of their part of speech.
; All caps (all uppercase)
: "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG"<br /> A unicase style with capital letters only. This can be used in headings and special situations, such as for typographical emphasis in text made on a typewriter. With the advent of the Internet, the all-caps style is more often used for emphasis; however, it is considered poor netiquette by some to type in all capitals, and said to be tantamount to shouting. Long spans of Latin-alphabet text in all upper-case are more difficult to read because of the absence of the ascenders and descenders found in lower-case letters, which aids recognition and legibility. In some cultures it is common to write family names in all caps to distinguish them from the given names, especially in identity documents such as passports. Certain musicians—such as Marina and Finneas, who are both known mononymously, and some bands such as Haim, Blackpink and Kiss—have their names stylised in all caps. Additionally, it is common for bands with vowelless names (a process colourfully known as "disemvoweling") to use all caps, with prominent examples including STRFKR, MSTRKRFT, PWR BTTM, SBTRKT, JPNSGRLS (now known as Hotel Mira), BLK JKS, MNDR, and DWNTWN.
; Small caps
: ""<br />Similar in form to capital letters but roughly the size of a lower-case "x", small caps can be used instead of lower-case letters and combined with regular caps in a mixed-case fashion. This is a feature of certain fonts, such as Copperplate Gothic. According to various typographical traditions, the height of small caps can be equal to or slightly larger than the x-height of the typeface (the smaller variant is sometimes called petite caps and may also be mixed with the larger variant). Small caps can be used for acronyms, names, mathematical entities, computer commands in printed text, business or personal printed stationery letterheads, and other situations where a given phrase needs to be distinguished from the main text.
; All lowercase
:"the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
:A unicase style with no capital letters. This is sometimes used for artistic effect, such as in poetry. Also commonly seen in computer languages, and in informal electronic communications such as SMS language and instant messaging. Examples in music are relatively common. For example, several of Taylor Swift's albums, including reputation, folklore, and evermore, were all stylised in lowercase. Bands such as Weezer, Twenty One Pilots and Silverchair were also stylised in lowercase for multiple albums during their respective careers, with the former consistently using lowercase in their logo since their first studio album. Billie Eilish's debut studio album—When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?—has all of its tracks stylised in lowercase. Some people, such as author bell hooks, write their names in all lowercase. Fully lowercase stylisation has been linked to the "disavowal of hierarchy", and on the Internet, frequently serves as "shorthand for authenticity and vulnerability".
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center;"
|+ A comparison of various case styles (from most to fewest capitals used)
|- style="text-align:left;border-bottom:1px solid #aaa;"
! Case style
!colspan="8"| Example
! Description
|-
! scope="row" | All-caps
| THE || VITAMINS || ARE || IN || MY || FRESH || CALIFORNIA || RAISINS
|style="text-align:left;"| All letters uppercase
|-
! scope="row" | Start case
| The || Vitamins || Are || In || My || Fresh || California || Raisins
|style="text-align:left;"| All words capitalised regardless of function
|-
! scope="row" | Title case
| The || Vitamins || Are || in || My || Fresh || California || Raisins
|style="text-align:left;"| The first word and all other words capitalised except for articles and short prepositions and conjunctions
|-
! scope="row" | Substantive (or German-style)
| The || Vitamins || are || in || my || fresh || California || Raisins
|style="text-align:left;"| The first word and all nouns capitalised; common in 18th-century English prose.
|-
! scope="row" | Rhetorical
| The || vitamins || are || in || my || fresh || California || Raisins
|style="text-align:left;"| Selective capitalisation of words for poetic or specific emphasis.
|-
! scope="row" | Sentence case
| The || vitamins || are || in || my || fresh || California || raisins
|style="text-align:left;"| The first word, proper nouns and some specified words capitalised; the modern standard.
|-
! scope="row" | Mid-sentence case
| the || vitamins || are || in || my || fresh || California || raisins
|style="text-align:left;"| As above but excepting special treatment of the first word
|-
! scope="row" | All-lowercase
| the || vitamins || are || in || my || fresh || || raisins
|style="text-align:left;"| All letters lowercase (unconventional in English prose)
|}
Headings and publication titles
In English-language publications, various conventions are used for the capitalisation of words in publication titles and headlines, including chapter and section headings. The rules differ substantially between individual house styles.
The convention followed by many British publishers (including scientific publishers like Nature and New Scientist, magazines like The Economist, and newspapers like The Guardian and The Times) and many U.S. newspapers is sentence-style capitalisation in headlines, i.e. capitalisation follows the same rules that apply for sentences. This convention is usually called sentence case. It may also be applied to publication titles, especially in bibliographic references and library catalogues. An example of a global publisher whose English-language house style prescribes sentence-case titles and headings is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
For publication titles it is, however, a common typographic practice among both British Another solution sometimes seen in Web typography is to use a serif font for "lower-case ell" in otherwise sans-serif material (1 <span style="font-family: serif;">l</span>).
The letter case of a prefix symbol is determined independently of the unit symbol to which it is attached. Lower case is used for all submultiple prefix symbols and the small multiple prefix symbols up to "k" (for kilo, meaning 10<sup>3</sup> = 1000 multiplier), whereas upper case is used for larger multipliers: or bumpy case.
When the first letter of the first word is lowercase ("iPod", "eBay", "theQuickBrownFox..."), the case is usually known as lower camel case or dromedary case (illustratively: dromedaryCase). This format has become popular in the branding of information technology products and services, with an initial "i" meaning "Internet" or "intelligent", as in iPod, or an initial "e" meaning "electronic", as in email (electronic mail) or e-commerce (electronic commerce).
Snake case
Punctuation is removed and spaces are replaced by single underscores. Normally the letters share the same case (e.g. "UPPER_CASE_EMBEDDED_UNDERSCORE" or "lower_case_embedded_underscore") but the case can be mixed, as in OCaml variant constructors (e.g. "Upper_then_lowercase"). The style may also be called pothole case, especially in Python programming, in which this convention is often used for naming variables. Illustratively, it may be rendered snake_case, pothole_case, etc.. When all-upper-case, it may be referred to as screaming snake case (or SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE) or hazard case.
In CSS, all property names and most keyword values are primarily formatted in kebab case.
Middot case
Similar to kebab case, above, except it uses interpunct rather than underscores to replace spaces. Its use is possible in many programming languages supporting Unicode identifiers, as unlike the hyphen it generally does not conflict with a reserved use for denoting an operator, albeit exceptions such as Julia exist. Its lack of visibility in most standard keyboard layouts certainly contribute to its infrequent employ, though some modern input tools allow one to reach it rather easily.
Alternating caps
thumb|Alternating caps are used on this Mocking SpongeBob meme to mock [[anti-queer opinions.]]
Alternating caps are an arbitrary mixing of the cases with no semantic or syntactic significance to the use of the capitals. Sometimes only vowels are upper case, at other times upper and lower case are alternated, but often it is simply random. One such usage is for mockery. For example, it is sometimes 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 soe.g., Sun Microsystems' naming of a windowing system NeWS.
Case folding and case conversion
In the character sets developed for computing, each upper- and lower-case letter is encoded as a separate character. In order to enable case folding and case conversion, the software needs to link together the two characters representing the case variants of a letter. (Some old character-encoding systems, such as the Baudot code, are restricted to one set of letters, usually represented by the upper-case variants.)
Case-insensitive operations can be said to fold case, from the idea of folding the character code table so that upper- and lower-case letters coincide. The conversion of letter case in a string is common practice in computer applications, for instance to make case-insensitive comparisons. Many high-level programming languages provide simple methods for case conversion, at least for the ASCII character set.
Whether or not the case variants are treated as equivalent to each other varies depending on the computer system and context. For example, user passwords are generally case sensitive in order to allow more diversity and make them more difficult to break. In contrast, case is often ignored in keyword searches in order to ignore insignificant variations in keyword capitalisation both in queries and queried material.
Unicode case folding and script identification
Unicode defines case folding through the three case-mapping properties of each character: upper case, lower case, and title case (in this context, "title case" relates to ligatures and digraphs encoded as mixed-case single characters, in which the first component is in upper case and the second component in lower case). These properties relate all characters in scripts with differing cases to the other case variants of the character.
As briefly discussed in Unicode Technical Note #26, 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 Gospels (MS 461) in the year 835. The modern practice of capitalising the first letter of every sentence seems to be imported (and is rarely used when printing Ancient Greek materials even today).
[[File:Evolution of minuscule.svg|thumb|center|700px
|Simplified relationship between various scripts leading to the development of modern lower case of standard Latin alphabet and that of the modern variants Fraktur (used in Germany until 1940s) and Gaelic (used in Ireland). Several scripts coexisted such as half-uncial and uncial, which derive from Roman cursive and Greek uncial, and Visigothic, Merovingian (Luxeuil variant here) and Beneventan. The Carolingian script was the basis for blackletter and humanist minuscule. What is commonly called "Gothic writing" is technically called blackletter (here textualis quadrata) and is completely unrelated to Visigothic script.
The letter j is i with a flourish, u and v are the same letter in early scripts and were used depending on their position in insular half-uncial and caroline minuscule and later scripts, w is a ligature of vv, in insular the rune wynn is used as a w (three other runes in use were the thorn (þ), ʻféʼ (ᚠ) as an abbreviation for cattle/goods and maðr (ᛘ) for man).
The letters y and z were very rarely used, in particular þ was written identically to y so y was dotted to avoid confusion, the dot was adopted for i only after late-caroline (protogothic), in beneventan script the macron abbreviation featured a dot above.
Lost variants such as r rotunda, ligatures and scribal abbreviation marks are omitted; long s is shown when no terminal s (the only variant used today) is preserved from a given script.
Humanist script was the basis for Venetian types which changed little until today, such as Times New Roman (a serifed typeface).
]]
Type cases
The individual type blocks used in hand typesetting are stored in shallow wooden or metal drawers known as "type cases". Each is subdivided into a number of compartments ("boxes") for the storage of different individual letters.
The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Advanced Proportional Principles (reprinted 1952) indicates that case in this sense (referring to the box or frame used by a compositor in the printing trade) was first used in English in 1588. Originally one large case was used for each typeface, then "divided cases", pairs of cases for majuscules and minuscules, were introduced in the region of today's Belgium by 1563, England by 1588, and France before 1723.
The terms upper and lower case originate from this division. By convention, when the two cases were taken out of the storage rack and placed on a rack on the compositor's desk, the case containing the capitals and small capitals stood at a steeper angle at the back of the desk, with the case for the small letters, punctuation, and spaces being more easily reached at a shallower angle below it to the front of the desk, hence upper and lower case.
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