thumb|300px|Williamsburg eighteenth century press lettersCapital letters or
majuscules [IPA pronunciation: /məˈdʒʌskjuls, ˈmædʒəˌskjuls/], in the
Roman alphabet A,
B,
C,
D, etc., may also be called
capitals, or
caps.
Upper case,
upper-case, or
uppercase is also often used in this context as synonym of capital. Manual typesetters kept them in the upper drawers of a desk or in the upper
type case, while keeping the more frequently used
minuscule letters in the lower type case. This practice might date back to
Johannes Gutenberg.
Capital and small letters are differentiated in the
Roman,
Greek,
Cyrillic and
Armenian alphabets. Most
writing systems (such as those used in
Georgian,
Glagolitic,
Arabic,
Hebrew, and
Devanagari) make no distinction between capital and lowercase letters (and, of course,
logographic writing systems such as
Chinese have no "letters" at all). Indeed, even European languages did not make this distinction before about 1300; both majuscule and minuscule letters existed, but a given text would use either one or the other.
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
- 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, supposed better legibility (see
ascender), 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.
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).
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
