Uppercase

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Revision as of 11:25, 3 March 2011

Williamsburg eighteenth century press letters

Capital letters or majuscules (məˈdʒʌskjuːlz, ˈmædʒəskjuːlz) are the larger of two type faces in a script. In the Roman alphabet they are A, B, C, D, etc. They are also called capitals (caps) or upper case (uppercase). The latter name 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 case, while keeping the type for the more frequently-used smaller letters in the lower type case.

Capital and minuscule letters are differentiated in the Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, and Coptic alphabets. Many other writing systems (such as those used in the Georgian language, Glagolitic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Devanagari) make no distinction between capital and lowercase letters – a system called unicase. Indeed, even European languages, except for Ancient Greek did not make this distinction before about the year 1300. Both "majuscule" and "minuscule" letters existed, but the printing press had not been invented, yet, and a given handwritten document could use either one size/style or the other. However, before about 1700 literacy was very low in Europe and the Americas, hence even handwriting was not used or understood by more than about one percent 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 only used by a small number of scholars.

History

Historically, the majuscule glyphs preceded the minuscules, which evolved from the majuscules for use in cursive writing. In Western European writing they 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 (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 majuscule (4th – 8th century A.D.) in contrast to the Carolingian minuscule (around 780 – 12th century)
• Gothic 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.

Usage

In alphabets with a case distinction, capitals are used for capitalization, acronyms, and emphasis (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 descenders found in lower-case letters, which can aid recognition. With the advent of modern computer editing technology and the Internet, emphasis is usually indicated by use of a single word Capital, italic, 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 communications, it is often considered very poor "netiquette" to type in all capitals, 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 Trask 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."^[1]

Capitalization is the writing of a word with its first letter in uppercase and the remaining letters in lowercase. Capitalization rules vary by language and are often quite complex, but in most modern languages that have capitalization, the first word of every sentence is capitalized, as are all proper nouns. Some languages, such as German, capitalize the first letter of all nouns; this was previously common in English as well. (See the article on capitalization for a detailed list of norms).

In some traditional forms of poetry, capitalization has been conventionally used as a marker to indicate the beginning of a line of verse independent of any other grammatical feature.

Other meanings

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 Kells).

See also

• All caps
• CamelCase
• Letter case
• Lower case (Minuscule)
• Roman square capitals
• Shift key
• Small caps
• Unicase

References

• Sussex.ac.uk

External links

• Printing capitals worksheet
• Codex Vaticanus B/03 Detailed description of Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 with many images.
• All-caps is harder to read
• Capitals, a Primer of Information About Capitalization With Some Practical Typographic Hints as to The Use Of Capitals by Frederick W. Hamilton, 1918, from Project Gutenberg