In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are letters or other symbols that have the graphic form of uppercase letters but which are typeset at a smaller size, approaching or matching the height of lowercase letters or text figures in the text. For example, the text "The quick brown fox" appears as The quick brown fox in small caps. Small caps are used in running text as a form of emphasis that is less dominant than all uppercase text, and as a method of emphasis or distinctiveness for text alongside or instead of italics, or when boldface is inappropriate. Small caps can be used to draw attention to the opening phrase or line of a new section of text, or to provide an additional style in a dictionary entry where many parts must be typographically differentiated. Well-designed small capitals are not simply scaled-down versions of normal capitals; they normally retain the same stroke weight as other letters and have a wider aspect ratio for readability.
Typically, the height of a small capital glyph will be one ex, the same height as most lowercase characters in the font. In fonts with relatively low x-height, however, small caps may be somewhat larger than this. For example, in some Tiro Typeworks fonts, small caps glyphs are 30% larger than x-height, and 70% the height of full capitals. To differentiate between these two alternatives, the x-height form is sometimes called petite caps, preserving the name "small caps" for the larger variant. OpenType fonts can define both forms via the "small caps" and the "petite caps" features. When the support for the petite caps feature is absent from a desktop publishing program, x-height small caps are often substituted. Many word processors and text formatting systems include an option to format text in caps and small caps, which leaves uppercase letters as they are, but converts lowercase letters to small caps. How this is implemented depends on the typesetting system; some can use true small caps glyphs that are included in modern professional typefaces; but less complex computer fonts do not have small-caps glyphs, so the typesetting system simply reduces the uppercase letters by a fraction (often 1.5 to 2 points less than the base scale). However, this will make the characters look somewhat out of proportion. A work-around to simulate real small capitals is to use a bolder version of the small caps generated by such systems, to match well with the normal weights of capitals and lowercase, especially when such small caps are extended about 5% or letter-spaced a half point or a point.
Uses Sometimes, small caps are used to indicate an emphasis stronger than italics, but less than all caps. Small caps are also often used, however, in sections of text that are unremarkable, where a run of uppercase capital letters might imply an emphasis that is not intended. For example, the style of some publications, like The New Yorker and The Economist, is to use small caps for acronyms and initialisms longer than three letters—thus "U.S." and "W.H.O." in normal caps but "nato" in small caps. The initialisms ad, ce, am, and pm are sometimes typeset in small caps. In printed plays small caps are used for stage directions and the names of characters before their lines. Some publications use small caps to indicate surnames. An elementary example is Don Quixote de La Mancha. In the 21st century, the practice is gaining traction in scientific publications. In many versions of the Old Testament of the Bible, the word "Lord" is set in small caps. Typically, an ordinary "Lord" corresponds to the use of the word Adonai in the original Hebrew, but the small caps "Lord" corresponds to the use of Yahweh in the original; in some versions the compound "Lord God" represents the Hebrew compound Adonai Yahweh. In zoological and botanical nomenclature, the small caps are occasionally used for genera and families. In computational complexity theory, a sub-field of computer science, the formal names of algorithmic problems, e.g. MᴀxSAT, are sometimes set in small caps. Linguists use small caps to analyze the morphology and tag (gloss) the parts of speech in a sentence; e.g.,
Linguists also use small caps to refer to the keywords in lexical sets for particular languages or dialects; e.g. the fleece and trap vowels in English. The Bluebook prescribes small caps for some titles and names in United States legal citations. The practice precedes World War I, with Harvard Law Review using it while referring to itself. By 1915, small caps were used for all titles of journals and books. In many books, mention of another part of the same book or mentions the work as a whole will be set in small caps. For example, articles in The World Book Encyclopedia refer to the encyclopedia as a whole and to the encyclopedia's other articles in small caps, as in the "Insurance" article's direction, at one point, to "See No-Fault Insurance", "No-Fault Insurance" being another of the encyclopedia's articles. Among Romance languages, as an orthographic tradition, only the French and Spanish languages render Roman numerals in small caps to denote centuries, e.g. xviiie siècle and siglo xviii for "18th century"; the numerals are cardinally postpositive in Spanish alone. In a name with unusual capitalization like "LeBron", in a all caps context, some of the lowercase letters may be set in small caps to preserve the orthographic information ("LeBRON").
The first word or phrase of a chapter of a book or article may be in small caps, especially if following a drop cap.
History
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