Letter case

Obviously, you’ll have seen letter cases before – such as proper nouns, or the start of sentences being capitalised. And while there are some normal capitalisation and case rules to follow, there are also just as many exceptions to the rule – after all, the author is the one in control of what they’re putting on the page!

In this blog, I’ll be covering the normal usage of capitalisation as well as some examples and forms that completely go against the grain. It’ll be good knowledge to have at your disposal as then you’ll be aware of the rules and how to break them!

Upper or lowercase?

Uppercase, capitals or the majuscule case are oppositional to the lowercase, miniscule letter forms – though often some counterpart letters appear similarly with just a size difference (y or Y, s or S for example). In different scenarios, they can differ in appearance, such as h/H, d/D, and g/G!

Lowercase is usually more common in regular text due to rules around capitalisation in typical grammar, with uppercase letters starting off sentences or distinguishing proper nouns, as mentioned before: this is called orthography.

However, depending on the context, purpose and type of the writing, you may see different rules being followed. For example, important details may be in all capitals, or for a more casual approach, there has also been an online movement where purely lowercase is used for communications.

But why?

The origins of the separation between upper and lower cases comes from letterpress printing – originally, type cases contained drawers of separate movable types. Typically, the capital letters were kept in an ‘upper’ case to prevent mixing them up.

Generally, the best way to tell apart majuscule and miniscule cases is that the majuscules are of generally uniform height – though as always, this does differ occasionally. Diacritics and other tails (like with Q or j) may alter the length of any letter.

Examples

This article follows the form of sentence case, the typical baseline standard for formal English – but there are also different cases out there! Title case differs based on house style, but usually every letter will be capitalised except for short prepositions and conjunctions – e.g. ‘The First Day of School’ or ‘Big Red Car or Blue Rock Crab?’

All caps is, as you would expect, a case where every single letter in a word or sentence is capitalised, such as ‘HELLO WORLD’. In some chatspeak, there are also different tones which can be achieved – like the mocking sarcasm of alternating capital and non-capital letters.

How low can you go?

That was some more information about lower and upper case letters – it has been simplified for the purposes of this post, but all in all the basics are there! As I’ve mentioned in a few blog posts before, it’s best to experiment and make your own rules!