Letter case

In orthography and typography, letter case (or just case) is the distinction between majuscule (capital or upper-case) and minuscule (lower-case) letters. Most Occidental languages (certainly those based on the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Armenian alphabets) use multiple letter cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. In addition, some computer programming languages use letter case to distinguish between special words, while others ignore case altogether.

Related Topics:
Orthography - Typography - Majuscule - Minuscule - Occidental - Languages - Latin - Cyrillic - Greek - Armenian - Programming language

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In English, capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence or a proper noun and for initials or acronyms. The first person pronoun I is also capitalised. Lower-case letters are normally used for all other purposes. There are however situations where further capitalisation may be used to give added emphasis, for example in headings and titles or to PICK OUT certain words. There are also a few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalization of the first letter. Other languages vary in their use of capitals. For example, in German the first letter of all nouns is capitalised.

Related Topics:
English - Proper noun - Acronym - Few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalization of the first letter - German

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If an alphabet has case, all or nearly all letters have both a majuscule and minuscule form. Both forms in each pair are considered to be the same letter: they have the same name, same pronunciation, and will be treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order. Languages have capitalisation rules to determine whether majuscules or minuscules are to be used in a given context.

Related Topics:
Alphabetical order - Capitalisation

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An example of a letter without both forms is the German ß (ess-tsett), which exists only in minuscule. When capitalised it normally becomes two letters, "SS" (although use of ß as a capital has been deemed permissible according to the recent spelling reform). This is because ß was originally a ligature of the two letters "ſs" (a long s and an s), both of which become "S" when capitalized. It later evolved into a letter in its own right. (ß is also occasionally referred to as a ligature of "sz", which recalls the way this consonant was pronounced in some medieval German dialects. The original spelling "sz" is preserved in Hungarian, which is pronounced as .)

Related Topics:
ß - Ligature - Long s - Hungarian

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