Letter case

Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally majuscule) and smaller lowercase (or 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. ⟨C, c⟩ or ⟨S, s⟩), but for others the shapes are different (e.g., ⟨A, a⟩ or ⟨G, 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.

"Lowercase" redirects here. For the musical style, see Lowercase (music). "Uppercase" redirects here. For the magazine, see Uppercase (magazine). "Capital Letters" redirects here. For the song, see Capital Letters (song).

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 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 (called capitalisation, or capitalised words), which makes the lowercase the more common variant 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 lower case letters denote generally different mathematical objects, which may be related when the two cases of the same letter are used; for example, $x$ may denote an element of a set $X$ .

The German letter "" formerly existed only in lower case. The orthographical capitalisation does not concern "ß", which generally does not occur at the beginning of a word, and in the all-caps style it has traditionally been replaced by the digraph "SS". Since June 2017, however, capital ẞ is accepted as an alternative in the all-caps style.^[14]

ß

The Greek upper-case letter "" has two different lower-case forms: "ς" in word-final position and "σ" elsewhere. In a similar manner, the Latin upper-case letter "S" used to have two different lower-case forms: "s" in word-final position and " ſ " elsewhere. The latter form, called the long s, fell out of general use before the middle of the 19th century, except for the 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.

Σ

The treatment of the Greek with upper-case letters is complicated.

iota subscript

Unlike most languages that use Latin-script and link the dotless upper-case "" with the dotted lower-case "i", Turkish as well as some forms of Azeri have both a dotted and dotless I, each in both upper and lower case. Each of the two pairs ("İ/i" and "I/ı") represents a distinctive phoneme.

I

In some languages, specific digraphs may be regarded as single letters, and in , the digraph "IJ/ij" is even capitalised with both components written in uppercase (for example, "IJsland" rather than "Ijsland").^[15] In other languages, such as Welsh and Hungarian, various digraphs are regarded as single letters for collation purposes, but the second component of the digraph will still be written in lower case even if the first component is capitalised. Similarly, in South Slavic languages whose orthography is coordinated between the Cyrillic and Latin scripts, 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 only in all-caps style should both components be in upper case (e.g. ǈiǉan–ǇIǇAN, ǋoǌa–ǊOǊA, ǅiǆa–ǄIǄA). Unicode designates a single character for each case variant (i.e., upper case, title case and lower case) of the three digraphs.^[16]

Dutch

Some English surnames such as fforbes are traditionally spelt with a digraph instead of a capital letter (at least for ff).

In the orthography, the ʻokina is a phonemic symbol that visually resembles a left single quotation mark. Representing the glottal stop, the ʻokina can be characterised as either a letter^[17] or a diacritic.^[18] As a unicase letter, the ʻokina is unaffected by capitalisation; it is the following letter that is capitalised instead. According to the Unicode standard, the ʻokina is formally encoded as U+02BB ʻ MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA,^[19] but it is not uncommon to substitute this with a similar punctuation character, such as the left single quotation mark or an apostrophe.^[20]

Hawaiian

Most styles capitalise all words except for short words (certain parts of speech, namely, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions); but the first word (always) and last word (in many styles) are also capitalised, regardless of their part of speech. Many styles capitalise longer prepositions such as "between" and "throughout", but not shorter ones such as "for" and "with".^[25] Typically, a preposition is considered short if it has up to three or four letters.

closed-class

A few styles capitalise all words in title case (the so-called start case), which has the advantage of being easy to implement and hard to get "wrong" (that is, "not edited to style"). Because of this rule's simplicity, software routines can handle 95% or more of the editing, especially if they are programmed for desired exceptions (such as "FBI" rather than "Fbi").

case-folding

As for whether hyphenated words are capitalised not only at the beginning but also after the hyphen, there is no universal standard; variation occurs 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 nonce [novel instance] compound modifiers), in which every part of the hyphenated word is capitalised (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 headwords (e.g., "Short-term Follow-up Care for Burns").

in the wild

Greek majuscule (9th–3rd century BCE) in contrast to the Greek (3rd century BCE – 12th century CE) and the later Greek minuscule

uncial script

(7th century BCE – 4th century CE) in contrast to the Roman uncial (4th–8th century CE), Roman half uncial, and minuscule

Roman majuscule

majuscule (4th–8th century CE) in contrast to the Carolingian minuscule (around 780 – 12th century)

Carolingian

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.

Gothic

Hamilton, Frederick W. (1918). – via Project Gutenberg.