In typography, text in all caps or all uppercase consists of capital letters without any lowercase letters. For example, the sentence "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG" is all caps. All caps text can be seen in legal documents, advertisements, newspaper headlines, and the titles on book covers. Short strings of words in uppercase letters appear bolder and "louder" than mixed case, and this is sometimes referred to as "screaming" or "shouting". All caps can also be used to indicate that a given word is an acronym. Studies have been conducted on the readability and legibility of all caps text. Scientific testing from the 20th century onward has generally indicated that all caps text is less legible and readable than lower-case text. In addition, switching to all caps may make text appear hectoring and obnoxious for cultural reasons, since all-capitals is often used in transcribed speech to indicate that the speaker is shouting. All caps text is common in comic books, as well as on older teleprinter and radio transmission systems, which often do not indicate letter case at all. In professional documents, a commonly preferred alternative to all caps text is the use of small caps to emphasise key names or acronyms (for example, Text in Small Caps), or the use of italics or (more rarely) bold. In addition, if all caps must be used it is customary to slightly widen the spacing between the letters, by around 10 percent of the point height. This practice is known as tracking or letterspacing. Some digital fonts contain alternative spacing metrics for this purpose.
Association with shouting or yelling
Messages completely in capital letters are often equated on social media to shouting and other impolite or argumentative behaviors. This became a mainstream interpretation with the advent of networked computers, from the 1980s onward. However, a similar interpretation was already evidenced by written sources that predated the computing era, in some cases by at least a century, and the textual display of shouting or emphasis was still not a settled matter by 1984. The following sources may be relevant to the history of all caps:
The 17 April 1856 edition of the Yorkville Enquirer (South Carolina) uses the expression "This time he shouted it out in capital letters." The 1880 book The Standard speaker and elocutionist has a section titled "SHOUTING STYLE", which states that "This will be seldom needed throughout an entire piece, but wherever the words imply calling, or commanding, it will be in keeping with the words to employ it. As examples note the following selections marked in CAPITAL letters as the appropriate place for shouting emphasis." A large number of literature examples are then given where all caps has been used to represent shouting. The 6 September 1958 edition of Bookseller: The Organ of the Book Trade describes writing in lower-case "rather than shouting with all caps. The effect is pleasing to anybody in a contemplative mood." A 2014 article on netiquette (online etiquette) in New Republic, titled "How Capital Letters Became Internet Code for Yelling", states that: According to Professor Paul Luna (of the University of Reading's department of typography and graphic communication), all caps has been used "to convey grandeur, pomposity, or aesthetic seriousness for thousands of years", and for many years to express anger or shouting in print. Examples are cited such as pianist Philippa Schuyler's 1940s biography titled "Composition in Black and White", which used all caps to "yell", and Robert Moses, who in the 1970s used all caps to "convey rage" at a draft of a book. Online newsgroups and bulletin board posts from around 1984 show that a user still needed to explain that "if it's in caps i'm trying to YELL", or that "Capitalizing whole words gives the impression that you're shouting". Another summed up that there seemed to be a developing consensus that emphasis was given to words via all caps, or by surrounding them with asterisks.
Usage
Print media
Before the development of lower-case letters in the 8th century, texts in the Latin alphabet were written in a single case, which is now considered to be capital letters. Text in all caps is not widely used in body copy. The main exception to this is the so-called fine print in legal documents. The Saanich dialect is written in all caps except for the suffix -s. Capital letters have been widely used in printed headlines from the early days of newspapers until the 1950s. In the 1990s, more than three-quarters of newspapers in the western world used lower-case letters in headline text. Discussion regarding the use of all caps for headlines centers on the greater emphasis offered by all caps versus the greater legibility offered by lower-case letters. Colin Wheildon conducted a scientific study with 224 readers who analyzed various headline styles and concluded that "Headlines set in capital letters are significantly less legible than those set in lower case."
Computing
All caps typography was common on teletype machines, such as those used by police departments, news, and the United States' then-called Weather Bureau, as well as early computers, such as certain early Apple II models and the ZX81, which had a limited support for lower-case text. This changed as full support of ASCII became standard, allowing lower-case characters. Some Soviet computers, such as Radio-86RK, Vector-06C, Agat-7, use 7-bit character encoding called KOI-7N2, where capital Russian letters replace lower-case Latin letters in the ASCII table, so can display both alphabets, but all caps only. Mikrosha is switchable to KOI-7N1, in this mode, it can display both caps and lower-case, but in Russian only. Other Soviet computers, such as BK0010, MK 85, Corvette and Agat-9, use 8-bit encoding called KOI-8, they can display both Russian and Latin letters in caps and lower-case. Many, but not all, NES games use all caps because of tile graphics, where charset and tiles share the same ROM. Game designers often choose to have less characters in favor of more tiles.
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