Letter case

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This article is about the orthographical and typographical concept. For the similarly-named grammatical concept, see Grammatical case. For the minimalist musical subgenre, see Lowercase (music). For New Testament minuscules, see Category:Greek New Testament minuscules.

In orthography and typography, letter case (or just case) is the distinction between the letters that are in larger upper case (also uppercase, capital letters, capitals, caps, large letters, or more formally majuscule [see Terminology]) and smaller lower case (also lowercase, small letters, or more formally minuscule [see Terminology]) in the written representation of certain languages. Here is a comparison of the upper and lower case versions of each letter included in the English alphabet (the exact representation will vary according to the font used):


Typographically, the basic difference between the majuscules and minuscules is not that the majuscules are big and minuscules small, but that the majuscules generally have the same height. The height of the minuscules varies, as some of them have parts higher or lower than the average, i.e. ascenders and descenders. In Times New Roman, for instance, b, d, f, h, k, l, t [1] are the letters with ascenders, and g, j, p, q, y are the ones with descenders. Further to this, with old-style numerals still used by some traditional or classical fonts—although most do have a set of alternative Lining Figures— 6 and 8 make up the ascender set, and 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 the descender set.

Letter case is often prescribed by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular discipline. In orthography, the uppercase is primarily reserved for special purposes, such as the first letter of a sentence or of a proper noun, which makes the lowercase the more common variant in text. In mathematics, letter case may indicate the relationship between objects with uppercase letters often representing "superior" objects (e.g. X could be a set containing the generic member x). Engineering design drawings are typically labelled entirely in upper-case letters, which are easier to distinguish than lowercase, especially when space restrictions require that the lettering be small.


Divided upper and lower type cases for movable type

The terms upper case and lower case can be written as two consecutive words, connected with a hyphen (upper-case and lower-case), or as a single word (uppercase and lowercase). These terms originated from the common layouts of the shallow drawers called type cases used to hold the movable type for letterpress printing. Traditionally, the capital letters were stored in a separate case that was located above the case that held the small letters, and the name proved easy to remember since capital letters are taller.[2]


Minuscule refers to lowercase letters. The word 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[3]), but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a nonstandard or variant spelling.[4] Miniscule is still less likely, however, to be used in reference to lower-case letters.

Bicameral script[edit]

Williamsburg 18th-century press letters

Most Western languages (particularly those with writing systems based on the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, and Armenian alphabets) use letter cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. Scripts using two separate cases are also called bicameral scripts. Many 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. The Georgian alphabet is special since it used to be bicameral, but today is mostly used in a unicameral way.

If an alphabet has letter case, all or nearly all letters have both forms. Paired forms are considered variants of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and will be treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order. The glyphs of lower-case letters can resemble smaller forms of the upper-case glyphs restricted to the base band (e.g. "C/c" and "S/s", cf. small caps) or can look hardly related (e.g. "D/d" and "G/g").

In scripts with a case distinction, lower case is generally used for the majority of text; capitals are used for capitalisation and emphasis. In addition, acronyms and initialisms are often written in all-caps, depending on various factors in English.


Main article: Capitalization


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. (Informal communication, such as texting, instant messaging or a handwritten sticky note, may not bother, but that is because its users usually do not expect it to be formal.) In English, capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence, a proper noun, or a proper adjective. There are a few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalisation of the first letter. 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 interjection "O" (although the latter is uncommon in modern usage, with "oh" being preferred). 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 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.

Other languages vary in their use of capitals. For example, in German all nouns are capitalised (this was previously common in English as well), 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.

Exceptional letters and digraphs[edit]

  • The German letter "ß" orthographically only exists in lower case, as it never occurs at the beginning of a word. In all-caps style "ß" is normally replaced by the digraph "SS" (but see Capital ß).[5]
  • The Cyrillic letter "Ӏ" usually has only a capital form, which is also used in lower-case text.[citation needed]
  • Unlike most Latin-script languages, which link the dotless upper-case "I" with the dotted lower-case "i", Turkish has both a dotted and dotless I in upper and lower case. Each of the two pairs ("İ/i" and "I/ı") represent a distinctive phoneme.[citation needed]
  • In some languages, specific digraphs may be regarded as a single letter. For example, in Slavic languages whose orthography is coordinated for the Cyrillic and Latin script, the Latin digraphs "ǈ/ǉ", "ǋ/ǌ" and "ǅ/ǆ" are each regarded as a single letter (like their Cyrillic equivalents "Љ/љ", "Њ/њ" and "Џ/џ", respectively), but even when capitalised, the second part resembles a lower-case letter (see discussion of "title case" below[clarification needed]). Only in all-caps style should both parts resemble a capital letter (e.g. ǈiǉan–ǇIǇAN, ǋoǌa–ǊOǊA, ǅiǆa–ǄIǄA).[citation needed]
  • In Dutch, the digraph "IJ/ij" is capitalised as a single entity (for example, "IJsland" rather than "Ijsland").[6]
  • In English (though not in Welsh), a name beginning with "ff" may be written in lower case, for example in a P. G. Wodehouse story "A Slice of Life" Wilfred Mulliner must circumvent the nasty Sir Jasper ffinch-ffarowmere to reach his love Angela.[citation needed]

Related phenomena[edit]

Similar orthographic and graphostylistic conventions are used for emphasis or following language-specific rules, including:

Stylistic or specialised usage[edit]

Case styles[edit]



Sentence case 
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
The standard case used in English prose. Only the first character is capitalised, except for proper nouns and other words which are generally capitalised by a more specific rule. Generally equivalent to the baseline universal standard of formal English orthography mentioned above.
Title case 
"The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog." or
"The Quick Brown Fox Jumps over the Lazy Dog."
(depending on how the house style treats four-letter prepositions). Also known as "headline style" and "capital case". First character in all words capitalised, except for certain subsets defined by rules that are not universally standardised. The standardisation is only at the level of house styles and individual style manuals. (See further explanation below at § Headings and publication titles.)
Start case (initial caps) 
"The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog."
A simplified variant of title case, start case capitalises all words, including articles, prepositions, and conjunctions.
All caps (all uppercase) 
Capital letters only. This style 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, all-caps 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.[7] Long spans of Latin-alphabet text in all upper-case are harder to read because of the absence of the ascenders and descenders found in lower-case letters, which can aid recognition.
Small caps 
"the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
Capital letters at the size of a lowercase "x". Slightly larger small-caps can be used in a Mixed Case fashion. 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."
No capital letters. This style is sometimes used for artistic effect, such as in poetry. Also commonly seen in computer commands, and in SMS language (avoiding the shift key, to type more quickly.[citation needed]
Case style Example Description
Start case or initial caps The Vitamins Are In My Fresh California Raisins All words capitalised regardless of function
Title case The Vitamins Are in My Fresh California Raisins First word and all other words capitalised except for articles, prepositions of fewer than 5 letters and conjunctions
The Vitamins are in My Fresh California Raisins As above and also excepting copulae (forms of "to be")
German-style sentence case The Vitamins are in my fresh California Raisins First word and all nouns capitalised
German-style mid-sentence case the Vitamins are in my fresh California Raisins All nouns capitalised (but not first word by default)
Sentence case The vitamins are in my fresh California raisins First word, proper nouns and some specified words capitalised
Mid-sentence case the vitamins are in my fresh California raisins As above, but first word not capitalised by default
Lowercase the vitamins are in my fresh california raisins All letters lowercase (unconventional in English)

Headings and publication titles[edit]

In English-language publications, varying conventions are used for capitalising 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, magazines, like The Economist and New Scientist, and newspapers, like The Guardian and The Times) and U.S. newspapers is to use sentence-style capitalisation in headlines, where 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. Examples of global publishers whose English-language house styles prescribe sentence-case titles and headings include the International Organization for Standardization.

As regards publication titles it is, however, a common typographic practice among both British[8] and U.S. publishers to capitalise significant words (and in the United States, this is often applied to headings, too). This family of typographic conventions is usually called title case. For example, R. M. Ritter's Oxford Manual of Style (2002) suggests capitalising "the first word and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, but generally not articles, conjunctions and short prepositions".[9] This is an old form of emphasis, similar to the more modern practice of using a larger or boldface font for titles. The rules for which words to capitalise are not based on any grammatically inherent correct/incorrect distinction and are not universally standardised; they are arbitrary and differ between style guides, although in most styles they tend to follow a few strong conventions, as follows:

  • Most styles capitalise all words except for short closed-class words (certain parts of speech, namely, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions); but the first word (always) and last word (in many styles) are also capped, regardless of part of speech. Many styles capitalise longer prepositions such as "between" or "throughout", but not shorter ones such as "for" or "with".[10] Among such styles, "four or more letters (≥4)" or "more than four letters (>4)" are the typical (although somewhat arbitrary and conflicting) threshold rules.

Title case is widely used in many English-language publications, especially in the United States. However, its conventions are sometimes not followed strictly—especially in informal writing.

In creative typography, such as music record covers and other artistic material, all styles are commonly encountered, including all-lowercase letters and special case styles, such as studly caps (see below). For example, in video-game wordmarks it is not uncommon to use stylised upper-case letters at the beginning and end of a title, with the intermediate letters in small caps or lower case (e.g., ArcaniA, ArmA, and DmC.

Multi-word proper nouns[edit]



With personal names, this practice can vary (sometimes all words are capitalised, regardless of length or function), but is not limited to English names. Examples include the English names Tamar of Georgia and Catherine the Great, "van" and "der" in Dutch names, "de", "los", and "y" in Spanish names, "de" or "d'" in French names, and "ibn" in Arabic names. Some surname prefixes also affect the capitalisation of the following internal letter, for example "Mac" in Celtic names and "Al" in Arabic names.

Special case styles[edit]


Spaces and punctuation are removed and the first letter of each word is capitalised. If this includes the first letter of the first word ("CamelCase", "PowerPoint", "TheQuick...", etc.), the case is sometimes called upper camel case (or, when written, "CamelCase"), Pascal case[11] or bumpy case. When, otherwise, the first letter of the first word is lowercase ("camelCase", "iPod", "eBay", etc.), the case is usually known as camelCase and sometimes as lower camel case. This is the format that has become popular in the branding of information technology products.
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. When all upper case, it may be referred to as "SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE".[12]
kebab-case[13][14] (spinal-case, Train-Case, Lisp-case) 
e.g. "The-quick-brown-fox-jumps-over-the-lazy-dog"
As per snake_case above, except hyphens rather than underscores are used to replace spaces. If every word is capitalised, the style is known as Train-Case.[citation needed]
e.g. "tHeqUicKBrOWnFoXJUmpsoVeRThElAzydOG"
Mixed case 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 just random. The name comes from the sarcastic or ironic implication that it was used in an attempt by the writer to convey their own coolness. (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 Microsystems' naming of a windowing system NeWS.)

Metric system[edit]


In the International System of Units (SI), a letter usually has a different meaning in upper and lower case when used as a unit symbol. By default, a unit symbol is written in lower case, but if the name of the unit is derived from a proper noun, the first letter of the symbol is written in upper case (nevertheless, the name of the unit, if spelled out, is always considered a common noun and written accordingly):[15]


  • 1 l, the original form, where "one" and "elle" look rather alike (in some typefaces).
  • 1 L, the optional form, where "one" and "capital L" look different.

The letter case of a prefix symbol is defined independently of the unit symbol it is attached to. Lower case is used for all submultiple prefix symbols and the small multiple prefix symbols up to "k" (for kilo, meaning 103 = 1000 multiplier), whereas upper case is used for larger multipliers:[15]

  • 1 mS, a small measure of electric conductance.
  • 1 MS, a large measure of electric conductance.
  • 1 Mm, a large measure of length.

Case folding[edit]

Case-insensitive operations are sometimes 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 folding, at least for the ASCII character set.

Methods in word processing[edit]


Methods in programming[edit]

In some forms of BASIC there are two methods for case folding:

 UpperA$ = UCASE$("a")
 LowerA$ = LCASE$("A")


 char upperA = toupper('a');
 char lowerA = tolower('A');

Case folding is different with different character sets. In ASCII or EBCDIC, case can be folded in the following way, in C:



Some computer programming languages offer facilities for converting text to a form in which all words are first-letter capitalised. Visual Basic calls this "proper case"; Python calls it "title case". This differs from usual title casing conventions, such as the English convention in which minor words are not capitalised.

Unicode case folding and script identification[edit]

Unicode 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 Unicode Technical Note #26,[16] "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 typographical nature), it would still be problematic for a multilingual character set or a font 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 ABБCГDΔΕZЄЗFΦGHIИJZ, 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.


Latin majuscule inscription on the Arch of Titus (82 AD)
Papyrus fragment with old Roman cursive script from the reign of Claudius (41–54 AD)
Example of Greek minuscule text Codex Ebnerianus (c. 1100 AD)




  • Greek majuscule (9th–3rd century BC) in contrast to the Greek uncial script (3rd century BC – 12th century AD) and the later Greek minuscule
  • Roman majuscule (7th century BC – 4th century AD) in contrast to the Roman uncial (4th–8th century AD), Roman Half Uncial, and minuscule
  • Carolingian majuscule (4th–8th century AD) in contrast to the Carolingian minuscule (around 780 – 12th century)




Type cases[edit]

Combined case with capital letters above small letters
Late 19th-century mixed cases






See also[edit]


  1. ^ In Roman Antiqua or other vertical fonts, the defunct Initial or Medial Long-s ‘ ſ ’ would have been an ascender, however, in italics, it could have been one of only two letters in the English or Expanded Latin Alphabet with both an ascender and a descender; the other being ‘ f ’ when italicised. The History and Technique of Lettering: by Alexander Nesbitt © 1957 (1st ed.). NYC: Dover Publications Inc. 1957. ISBN 0-486-20427-8. 
  2. ^ Hansard, Thomas Curson (1825). Typographia, an Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing. p. 426. Retrieved 12 August 2015. 
  5. ^ http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/doppel-s-und-scharfes-s#K160
  6. ^ "Ijsland / IJsland". Taalunie. Retrieved 9 March 2014. 
  7. ^ RFC 1855 "Netiquette Guidelines"
  8. ^ "The Guardian and Observer Style Guide". Retrieved 10 June 2014. 
  11. ^ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2004/02/03/67024.aspx
  12. ^ "Ruby Style Guide". Retrieved 11 November 2013. 
  13. ^ "lodash documentation". 
  14. ^ "jQuery 3.0 and jQuery Compat 3.0 Alpha Versions Released". 
  19. ^ a b c David Bolton (1997). "Type Cases". The Alembic Press. Archived from the original on 16 July 2007. Retrieved 23 April 2007. 

External links[edit]