Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally majuscule) and smaller lowercase (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⟩ ⟨S, s⟩ ⟨O, o⟩), but for others the shapes are different (e.g., ⟨A, a⟩ ⟨G, g⟩ ⟨F, f⟩). 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. 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 denoted by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular discipline. In orthography, the uppercase is reserved for special purposes, such as the first letter of a sentence or of a proper noun (called capitalisation, or capitalised words), which makes lowercase more common 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 lowercase letters denote generally different mathematical objects, which may be related when the two types of cases of the same letter are used; for example, x may denote an element of a set X.
Terminology
The terms upper case and lower case may be written as two consecutive words, connected with a hyphen (upper-case and lower-case – particularly if they pre-modify another noun), 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 shallow tray or "case" that was located above the case that held the small letters.
Majuscule Majuscule (, less commonly ), for palaeographers, is technically any script whose letters have no or very few ascenders and descenders (for example, the majuscule scripts used in the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, or the Book of Kells). Consequently, all of the letters of a majuscule script are of roughly the same height and it is written within the space of just two (imaginary or real) parallel lines. This is contrasted with the four lines required by a minuscule script, on which see below. While majuscule scripts were originally used to write entire texts, their letters eventually came to be used primarily with the modern function of uppercase letters in European writing, so the term may sometimes be used as a synonym of 'uppercase letter' or 'capital' in contemporary contexts.
Minuscule
Minuscule refers to lower-case letters. In paleography, the term refers to a script which includes letters of different heights, with ascenders and descenders, so it needs to be written within a space of four (imaginary or real) parallel lines. Minuscule script letters eventually came to be used with the function of lowercase letters in European writing.
Typographical considerations The glyphs of lowercase letters can resemble smaller forms of the uppercase glyphs restricted to the baseline (e.g. "C/c" and "S/s", cf. small caps) or can look hardly related (e.g. "D/d" and "G/g"). Here is a comparison of the upper and lowercase variants of each letter included in the English alphabet (the exact representation will vary according to the typeface and font used):
(Some lowercase letters have variations e.g. a/ɑ.) Typographically, the basic difference between the majuscules and minuscules is not that the majuscules are big and minuscules small, but that the majuscules generally are of uniform height (although, depending on the typeface, there may be some exceptions, particularly with Q and sometimes J having a descending element; also, various diacritics can add to the normal height of a letter).
There is more variation in the height of the minuscules, as some of them have parts higher (ascenders) or lower (descenders) than the typical size. Normally, b, d, f, h, k, l, t are the letters with ascenders, and g, j, p, q, y are the ones with descenders. In addition, with old-style numerals still used by some traditional or classical fonts, 6 and 8 make up the ascender set, and 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 the descender set.
Bicameral script
A minority of writing systems use two separate cases. Such writing systems are called bicameral scripts. These scripts include the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Glagolitic, Adlam, Warang Citi, Old Hungarian, Garay, Zaghawa, Osage, Vithkuqi, and Deseret scripts. Languages written in these scripts use letter cases as an aid to clarity. The Georgian alphabet has several variants, and there were attempts to use them as different cases, but the modern written Georgian language does not distinguish case. All 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. In scripts with a case distinction, lowercase is generally used for the majority of text; capitals are used for capitalisation and emphasis when boldface is not available. Acronyms (and particularly initialisms) are often written in all-caps, depending on various factors.
Capitalisation
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