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87-464: Sigma ( / ˈ s ɪ ɡ m ə / SIG -mə ; uppercase Σ , lowercase σ , lowercase in word-final position ς ; Ancient Greek : σίγμα ) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet . In the system of Greek numerals , it has a value of 200. In general mathematics, uppercase Σ is used as an operator for summation . When used at the end of a letter-case word (one that does not use all caps ),

174-660: A long s (ſ), and when coming before z , it formed the ligature ß , which has survived in German to this day as a separate letter. S would settle as it appears today a terminal s (as it always had been at a word's end) after the 7th century AD – the internal forms were widely deprecated by the 19th century. However, thanks to classical revival , Roman capitals were reintroduced by humanists making old Latin inscriptions easily legible while many medieval manuscripts are unreadable to an untrained modern reader, due to unfamiliar letterforms, narrow spacing and abbreviation marks save for

261-522: A 90° CW turned s for w, capitals without "belly" or swashes, forward-facing capital F etc.). With the spread of Western Christianity the Latin alphabet spread to the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Germanic languages , displacing their earlier Runic alphabets , as well as to the speakers of Baltic languages , such as Lithuanian and Latvian , and several (non- Indo-European ) Uralic languages , most notably Hungarian , Finnish and Estonian . During

348-529: A common typographic practice among both British and U.S. publishers to capitalise significant words (and in the United States, this is often applied to headings, too). This family of typographic conventions is usually called title case . For example, R. M. Ritter's Oxford Manual of Style (2002) suggests capitalising "the first word and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, but generally not articles, conjunctions and short prepositions". This

435-648: A few forms such as Kalendae ; Q survived only before V (representing /kw/ ), and C was used everywhere else. G was later invented to distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/ ; it was originally simply a C with an additional stroke. K was marginalized in favour of C , which afterward stood for both /ɡ/ and /k/. Probably during the 3rd century BC, the Z was dropped and a new letter G was placed in its position – according to Plutarch , by Spurius Carvilius Ruga  – so that afterward, C = /k/, G = /ɡ/. Old Latin could be written from right to left (as were Etruscan and early Greek) or boustrophedon , while writing after

522-433: A form of shorthand, called tironian notes , were used. Whereas the meticulously drawn textualis quadrata was the most common script for religious works, starting from the 13th century a common style of handwriting for vernacular work, which were written at speed, was secretary hand , a cursive script, which features amongst several ligatures and contraction distinctive strong "elephant's ear" ascenders and descenders In

609-444: A handwritten sticky note , may not bother to follow the conventions concerning capitalisation, but that is because its users usually do not expect it to be formal. Similar orthographic and graphostylistic conventions are used for emphasis or following language-specific or other rules, including: In English, a variety of case styles are used in various circumstances: In English-language publications, various conventions are used for

696-514: A man's father's name is the same as his own name, thus Dionysodoros son of Dionysodoros would be written Διονυσόδωρος Ͻ ( Dionysodoros Dionysodorou ). In Unicode , the above variations of lunate sigma are encoded as U+03F9 Ϲ GREEK CAPITAL LUNATE SIGMA SYMBOL ; U+03FD Ͻ GREEK CAPITAL REVERSED LUNATE SIGMA SYMBOL , U+03FE Ͼ GREEK CAPITAL DOTTED LUNATE SIGMA SYMBOL , and U+03FF Ͽ GREEK CAPITAL REVERSED DOTTED LUNATE SIGMA SYMBOL . Sigma

783-458: A marker to indicate the beginning of a line of verse independent of any grammatical feature. In political writing, parody and satire, the unexpected emphasis afforded by otherwise ill-advised capitalisation is often used to great stylistic effect, such as in the case of George Orwell's Big Brother . Other languages vary in their use of capitals. For example, in German all nouns are capitalised (this

870-498: A more general sense. It can also be seen as customary to capitalise any word – in some contexts even a pronoun  – referring to the deity of a monotheistic religion . Other words normally start with a lower-case letter. There are, however, situations where further capitalisation may be used to give added emphasis, for example in headings and publication titles (see below). In some traditional forms of poetry, capitalisation has conventionally been used as

957-563: A recognised subform to transliterate exotic tongues, denoted the same letter. After the evolution from the Western Greek Alphabet through Old Italic alphabet , G developed from C, the consonantal I (namely J) from a flourished I, V and U split likewise and the Germanic-centred ligature of VV became W, the letter thorn Þ was introduced from the runic alphabet but was lost in all except Icelandic, and s would be normally written as

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1044-582: A single pen lift (with the exception of x and the marks added after writing the word which were dots on i and j and the bar of the ascender of t) with straight or looped ascenders and descenders. In Italy, Italian hand is instead known as "posata" (posed). Several national styles of cursive were developed, such as Spencerian Script in the US. Despite the recent decline, in several countries cursive scripts are still taught in schools today , often modified to be more similar to roman type letters (tailless z, w-like instead of

1131-478: A spelling mistake (since minuscule is derived from the word minus ), but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a non-standard or variant spelling. Miniscule is still less likely, however, to be used in reference to lower-case letters. The glyphs of lowercase letters can resemble smaller forms of the uppercase glyphs restricted to the baseband (e.g. "C/c" and "S/s", cf. small caps ) or can look hardly related (e.g. "D/d" and "G/g"). Here

1218-599: A succession of vertical strokes, in English. Within each language there are homophonic heterographs (words written differently but sounding the same) and the adoption of digraphs for new sounds, such as ⟨sh⟩ for the voiceless postalveolar fricative in English, being ⟨ch⟩ in French, yet ⟨ch⟩ in Italian denotes k or the very basic words that began qu and their derivations. A theme for digraphs

1305-586: Is fraktur . In Italy , due to the revival of classical culture , the heavy gothic styles were soon displaced by Venetian Latin types, also called antiqua , which were based on the inscriptional capitals on Roman buildings and monuments . However, humanist scholars of the early 15th century mistook Carolingian minuscule as the authentic writing style of the Romans and redesigned the small Carolingian letter, lengthening ascenders and descenders, and adding incised serifs and finishing strokes to integrate them with

1392-623: Is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician , Greek , and Etruscan . The phonetic values of some letters changed , some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for

1479-503: Is a comparison of the upper and lower case 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

1566-543: Is also known as spinal case , param case , Lisp case in reference to the Lisp programming language , or dash case (or illustratively as kebab-case , looking similar to the skewer that sticks through a kebab ). If every word is capitalised, the style is known as train case ( TRAIN-CASE ). In CSS , all property names and most keyword values are primarily formatted in kebab case. "tHeqUicKBrOWnFoXJUmpsoVeRThElAzydOG" Mixed case with no semantic or syntactic significance to

1653-409: Is an old form of emphasis , similar to the more modern practice of using a larger or boldface font for titles. The rules which prescribe which words to capitalise are not based on any grammatically inherent correct–incorrect distinction and are not universally standardised; they differ between style guides, although most style guides tend to follow a few strong conventions, as follows: Title case

1740-417: Is capitalised, as are all proper nouns . Capitalisation in English, in terms of the general orthographic rules independent of context (e.g. title vs. heading vs. text), is universally standardised for formal writing. Capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence, a proper noun, or a proper adjective . The names of the days of the week and the names of the months are also capitalised, as are

1827-424: Is capitalised. Nevertheless, the name of the unit, if spelled out, is always considered a common noun and written accordingly in lower case. For example: For the purpose of clarity, the symbol for litre can optionally be written in upper case even though the name is not derived from a proper noun. For example, "one litre" may be written as: The letter case of a prefix symbol is determined independently of

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1914-399: 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 lower case letters denote generally different mathematical objects , which may be related when

2001-501: 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

2088-422: Is no technical requirement to do so – e.g., Sun Microsystems ' naming of a windowing system NeWS . Illustrative naming of the style is, naturally, random: stUdlY cAps , StUdLy CaPs , etc.. In the character sets developed for computing , each upper- and lower-case letter is encoded as a separate character. In order to enable case folding and case conversion, the software needs to link together

2175-405: Is not available. Acronyms (and particularly initialisms) are often written in all-caps , depending on various factors . Capitalisation is the writing of a word with its first letter in uppercase and the remaining letters in lowercase. Capitalisation rules vary by language and are often quite complex, but in most modern languages that have capitalisation, the first word of every sentence

2262-845: Is removed and spaces are replaced by single underscores . Normally the letters share the same case (e.g. "UPPER_CASE_EMBEDDED_UNDERSCORE" or "lower_case_embedded_underscore") but the case can be mixed, as in OCaml variant constructors (e.g. "Upper_then_lowercase"). The style may also be called pothole case , especially in Python programming, in which this convention is often used for naming variables. Illustratively, it may be rendered snake_case , pothole_case , etc.. When all-upper-case, it may be referred to as screaming snake case (or SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE ) or hazard case . "the-quick-brown-fox-jumps-over-the-lazy-dog" Similar to snake case, above, except hyphens rather than underscores are used to replace spaces. It

2349-415: Is said to have brought to Egypt, and from Egypt Cadmus took them to Greece. Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15. Apollo on the lyre added the rest. Below is a table synoptically showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the proposed correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the sound values, names, and descendants of

2436-561: Is sentence-style capitalisation in headlines, i.e. capitalisation follows the same rules that apply for sentences. This convention is usually called sentence case . It may also be applied to publication titles, especially in bibliographic references and library catalogues. An example of a global publisher whose English-language house style prescribes sentence-case titles and headings is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). For publication titles it is, however,

2523-466: Is today. The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages. W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent the sound [w] found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the runic Wynn letter which had been used for the same sound. In

2610-424: Is widely used in many English-language publications, especially in the United States. However, its conventions are sometimes not followed strictly – especially in informal writing. In creative typography, such as music record covers and other artistic material, all styles are commonly encountered, including all-lowercase letters and special case styles, such as studly caps (see below). For example, in

2697-615: Is widespread use of h as a second letter, avoiding diacritics onto, under, or over the first letter (unavailable in most basic printing presses ) as in Romance languages h is usually a voiceless remnant. It is generally held that the Latins derived their alphabet from the Etruscan alphabet . The Etruscans, in turn, derived their alphabet from the Greek colony of Cumae in Italy, who used a Western variant of

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2784-702: The Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire . The eastern half of the Roman Empire, including Greece , Asia Minor , the Levant , and Egypt , continued to use Greek as a lingua franca , but Latin was widely spoken in the western half of the Empire, and as the western Romance languages , including French , Italian , Portuguese , Spanish and Catalan , evolved out of Latin they continued to use and adapt

2871-463: The Middle Ages the Latin alphabet also came into use among the peoples speaking West Slavic languages , including the ancestors of modern Poles , Czechs , Croats , Slovenes , and Slovaks , as these peoples adopted Roman Catholicism. Speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted both Orthodox Christianity and Cyrillic script . As late as 1492, the Latin alphabet was limited primarily to

2958-516: The Trojan War , but there is no historically sound basis to this tale. The Parcae , Clotho , Lachesis , and Atropos invented seven Greek letters – A B H T I Y. Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, when they fly, form letters. Palamedes , too, son of Nauplius , invented eleven letters; Simonides , too, invented four letters – O E Z PH; Epicharmus of Sicily , two – P and PS. The Greek letters Mercury

3045-527: The final form (ς) is used. In Ὀδυσσεύς (Odysseus), for example, the two lowercase sigmas (σ) in the center of the name are distinct from the word-final sigma (ς) at the end. The Latin letter S derives from sigma while the Cyrillic letter Es derives from a lunate form of this letter. The shape (Σς) and alphabetic position of sigma is derived from the Phoenician letter [REDACTED] ( shin ). Sigma's original name may have been san , but due to

3132-520: The wordmarks of video games it is not uncommon to use stylised upper-case letters at the beginning and end of a title, with the intermediate letters in small caps or lower case (e.g., ArcaniA , ArmA , and DmC ). Single-word proper nouns are capitalised in formal written English, unless the name is intentionally stylised to break this rule (such as e e cummings , bell hooks , eden ahbez , and danah boyd ). Multi-word proper nouns include names of organisations, publications, and people. Often

3219-480: The 16th–17th centuries secretary hand was slowly replaced by italic scripts , a semi-cursive group of scripts. Early italic hand, dating from the 15th century, was based on humanist minuscule with pronounced serifs, a single story a , open tailed g , slight forward slope and in the late renaissance could have been written with flourishes and swashes . Italic hand developed into Cancelleresca (chancery) corsiva (also an italic script) used for Vatican documents from

3306-641: The 19th century the Church used the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet . Vietnam , under French rule, adapted the Latin alphabet for Vietnamese , which had previously used Chinese characters. The Latin alphabet is also used for many Austronesian languages , including Tagalog and the other languages of the Philippines , and the official Malaysian and Indonesian , replacing earlier Arabic and Brahmic scripts. In 1928, as part of Kemal Atatürk 's reforms, Turkey adopted

3393-590: The Greek alphabet, which was in turn derived from the Phoenician alphabet , itself derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Latins ultimately adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters. Gaius Julius Hyginus , who recorded much Roman mythology, mentions in Fab. 277 the legend that it was Carmenta , the Cimmerian Sibyl , who altered fifteen letters of the Greek alphabet to become the Latin alphabet, which her son Evander introduced into Latium, supposedly 60 years before

3480-639: The Latin alphabet for the Turkish language , replacing the Arabic alphabet. Most of Turkic -speaking peoples of the former USSR , including Tatars , Bashkirs , Azeri , Kazakh , Kyrgyz and others, used the Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s. In the 1940s all those alphabets were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics adopted

3567-428: The Latin alphabet generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and for proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English , for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalised; whereas Modern English of the 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalised, in the same way that Modern German

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3654-524: The Latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic , a reflection of the dominant religion practiced among those peoples. Among these, Polish uses a variety of diacritics and digraphs to represent special phonetic values, as well as l with stroke  – ł – for a w-like sound. Czech uses diacritics as in Dvořák ;– the term háček ("little hook") is Czech. Croatian and the Latin version of Serbian use carons, or háčeks, in č, š, ž, an acute in ć and

3741-450: The Latin alphabet, and even by emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals , but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD, but it probably existed earlier than that. The Latin alphabet spread from Italy , along with the Latin language , to the lands surrounding

3828-640: The Latin alphabet, replacing Cyrillic. Azerbaijan , Uzbekistan , and Turkmenistan have officially adopted the Latin alphabet for Azeri , Uzbek , and Turkmen , respectively. In the 1970s, the People's Republic of China developed an official transliteration of Mandarin Chinese into the Latin alphabet, called Pinyin , used to aid children and foreigners in learning the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Aside from that, Chinese characters are used for reading and writing. West Slavic and some South Slavic languages use

3915-517: The Latin alphabet. In the East, it evolved forming the Romanian language. Some of the letters had variant shapes in epigraphy : The lower case (minuscule) letters developed in the Middle Ages from New Roman Cursive writing, first as the uncial script, and later as minuscule script. The old Roman letters were retained for formal inscriptions and for emphasis in written documents. The languages that use

4002-544: The Middle Ages. Today, it is known as lunate sigma (uppercase Ϲ , lowercase ϲ ), because of its crescent -like shape, and is still widely used in decorative typefaces in Greece, especially in religious and church contexts, as well as in some modern print editions of classical Greek texts. A dotted lunate sigma ( sigma periestigmenon , Ͼ ) was used by Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 BC) as an editorial sign indicating that

4089-509: The Phoenician letters. The original Latin alphabet was: The oldest Latin inscriptions do not distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/ , represented both by C, K and Q according to position. This is explained by the fact that the Etruscan language did not make this distinction. K was used before A; Q was used (if at all) before O or V; C was used elsewhere. C derived from Greek Gamma (Γ) and Q from Greek Koppa (Ϙ). In later Latin, K survived only in

4176-455: The Roman capitals. By the time moveable type reached Italy several decades later, the humanistic writing had evolved into a consistent model known as humanistic minuscule , which served as the basis for Venetian typeface. In addition to the aforementioned square capitals used in architecture, in the Roman empire and in the Middle Ages for rapidly written vernacular documents roman cursive or even

4263-429: The Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a rounded u ; from this was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minuscule v was derived from V for the consonant. In the case of I, a word-final swash form, j , came to be used for the consonant, with the un-swashed form restricted to vowel use. Such conventions were erratic for centuries. J was introduced into English for

4350-557: The Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek, but adopted the simplified names of the Etruscans, which derived from saying the sounds of the letters: the vowels stood for themselves, the names of the stop consonant letters were formed by adding the neutral vowel e , which in Latin became /eː/ (except for K and Q, which were distinguished from C by appending the vowel which followed them in Etruscan orthography), and

4437-619: The apostrophe and Carolingian minuscule letters (lower caps). Phonetic value of some letters has changed in live languages whether or not from Latin origins , each seeing diverse softenings, drifts or phonetic complications such as in Italian , English , Dutch and French . Vowels have also evolved with notably great vowel shifts in English and Portuguese . Orthography does not fully match phonetics – an illustration being that ⟨o⟩ became used rather than ⟨u⟩ when before i, m, n, v, w for legibility, namely to avoid

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4524-515: The capitalisation of the following internal letter or word, for example "Mac" in Celtic names and "Al" in Arabic names. In the International System of Units (SI), a letter usually has different meanings in upper and lower case when used as a unit symbol. Generally, unit symbols are written in lower case, but if the name of the unit is derived from a proper noun, the first letter of the symbol

4611-414: The capitalisation of words in publication titles and headlines , including chapter and section headings. The rules differ substantially between individual house styles. The convention followed by many British publishers (including scientific publishers like Nature and New Scientist , magazines like The Economist , and newspapers like The Guardian and The Times ) and many U.S. newspapers

4698-446: The case is usually known as lower camel case or dromedary case (illustratively: dromedaryCase ). This format has become popular in the branding of information technology products and services, with an initial "i" meaning " Internet " or "intelligent", as in iPod , or an initial "e" meaning "electronic", as in email (electronic mail) or e-commerce (electronic commerce). "the_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over_the_lazy_dog" Punctuation

4785-418: The code too abstract and overloaded for the common programmer to understand. Understandably then, such coding conventions are highly subjective , and can lead to rather opinionated debate, such as in the case of editor wars , or those about indent style . Capitalisation is no exception. "theQuickBrownFoxJumpsOverTheLazyDog" or "TheQuickBrownFoxJumpsOverTheLazyDog" Spaces and punctuation are removed and

4872-566: The complicated early history of the Greek epichoric alphabets , san came to be identified as a separate letter in the Greek alphabet, represented as Ϻ . Herodotus reports that "san" was the name given by the Dorians to the same letter called "sigma" by the Ionians . According to one hypothesis, the name "sigma" may continue that of Phoenician samekh ( [REDACTED] ), the letter continued through Greek xi , represented as Ξ . Alternatively,

4959-456: The consonant in the 17th century (being rare as a vowel), but it was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until the 19th century. The names of the letters were largely unchanged, with the exception of H. As the sound /h/ disappeared from the Romance languages, the original Latin name hā became difficult to distinguish from A. Emphatic forms such as [aha] and [axxa] were used, developing eventually into acca ,

5046-404: The context of an imperative, strongly typed language. The third supports the macro facilities of LISP, and its tendency to view programs and data minimalistically, and as interchangeable. The fourth idiom needs much less syntactic sugar overall, because much of the semantics are implied, but because of its brevity and so lack of the need for capitalization or multipart words at all, might also make

5133-410: The direct ancestor of English aitch . With the spread of printing , several styles of Latin typography emerged with typefaces based on various minuscules of the Middle Ages depending on the region. In Germany, starting with Johannes Gutenberg the commonly used typefaces were based on blackletter scripts, a tradition that lasted until the 20th century, an example of the later typefaces used

5220-442: The first century BC was almost always left-to-right. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters was short-lived, but after the conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC the letters Y and Z were, respectively, adopted and readopted from the Greek alphabet and placed at the end. Now the new Latin alphabet contained 23 letters: The Latin names of some of the letters are disputed. In general, however,

5307-460: The first letter of each word is capitalised. If this includes the first letter of the first word (CamelCase, " PowerPoint ", "TheQuick...", etc.), the case is sometimes called upper camel case (or, illustratively, CamelCase ), Pascal case in reference to the Pascal programming language or bumpy case . When the first letter of the first word is lowercase (" iPod ", " eBay ", "theQuickBrownFox..."),

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5394-437: The first-person pronoun "I" and the vocative particle " O ". There are a few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalisation of the first letter. Honorifics and personal titles showing rank or prestige are capitalised when used together with the name of the person (for example, "Mr. Smith", "Bishop Gorman", "Professor Moore") or as a direct address, but normally not when used alone and in

5481-450: The italic scripts after the 16th century, more cursive forms evolved, known as Copperplate script due to way the calligraphy books were printed. These scripts reached their height in the 18–19th century. The main examples were the Italian hand and the English round-hand, which in Britain were taught to men and women respectively, these scripts feature flowing letters which could be written with

5568-572: The languages spoken in western, northern and central Europe . The Orthodox Christian Slavs of eastern and southeastern Europe mostly used the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Greek alphabet was still in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic alphabet was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians , Indonesians , Malays , and Turkic peoples . Most of

5655-406: The line marked as such is at an incorrect position. Similarly, a reversed sigma ( antisigma , Ͻ ), may mark a line that is out of place. A dotted antisigma ( antisigma periestigmenon , Ͽ ) may indicate a line after which rearrangements should be made, or to variant readings of uncertain priority. In Greek inscriptions from the late first century BC onwards, Ͻ was an abbreviation indicating that

5742-472: The lower and upper case letters . Modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts, and there are few regional variants. The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as Roman square capitals . The lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Over the ages many dissimilar stylistic forms of each letter evolved but, when not becoming

5829-564: The majuscule scripts used in the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 , or the Book of Kells ). By virtue of their visual impact, this made the term majuscule an apt descriptor for what much later came to be more commonly referred to as uppercase letters. Minuscule refers to lower-case letters . The word is often spelled miniscule , by association with the unrelated word miniature and the prefix mini- . That has traditionally been regarded as

5916-602: The middle of the 16th century, which featured a more prominent slope and lavish swashes (often curled) on capitals. Additionally this script led to the italic type in typography, which could be used within a text written in Roman type ( e.g. "The taxonomic name of the red fox is Vulpes vulpes ") and thanks to Edward Johnston this script has enjoyed a revival in the 20th century. Note: "Italic hand" (a semi-cursive script), "Ital ian hand" (a copperplate cursive script) and "Italic type " (a typeface) are different concepts. From

6003-433: 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 bold

6090-482: The name may have been a Greek innovation that simply meant 'hissing', from the root of σίζω ( sízō , from Proto-Greek *sig-jō 'I hiss'). In handwritten Greek during the Hellenistic period (4th–3rd century BC), the epigraphic form of Σ was simplified into a C-like shape, which has also been found on coins from the 4th century BC onward. This became the universal standard form of sigma during late antiquity and

6177-732: The name, though there is some variation in this. With personal names , this practice can vary (sometimes all words are capitalised, regardless of length or function), but is not limited to English names. Examples include the English names Tamar of Georgia and Catherine the Great , " van " and "der" in Dutch names , " von " and "zu" in German , "de", "los", and "y" in Spanish names , "de" or "d'" in French names , and "ibn" in Arabic names . Some surname prefixes also affect

6264-421: The names of the continuant consonants were formed by preceded the sound with /e/ . X was named /eks/ rather than /kseː/ , as /ks/ could not begin a word in Latin (and possibly Etruscan). When the letter Y was introduced into Latin, it was probably called hy /hyː/ as in Greek (the name upsilon being not yet in use), but was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing

6351-667: 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. 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 , 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

6438-561: The rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script . By the 18th century, the standard Latin alphabet, cemented by the rise of the printing press , comprised the 26 letters we are familiar with today, albeit in Romance languages the letter ⟨w⟩ was until the 19th century very rare. During colonialism , the alphabet began its spread around the world, being employed for previously unwritten languages, notably in

6525-467: The rules for "title case" (described in the previous section) are applied to these names, so that non-initial articles, conjunctions, and short prepositions are lowercase, and all other words are uppercase. For example, the short preposition "of" and the article "the" are lowercase in "Steering Committee of the Finance Department". Usually only capitalised words are used to form an acronym variant of

6612-511: 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 ( / ˈ m æ dʒ ə s k juː l / , less commonly / m ə ˈ dʒ ʌ s k juː l / ), for palaeographers , is technically any script whose letters have very few or very short ascenders and descenders, or none at all (for example,

6699-511: The sounds /i/ and /y/ . Z was given its Greek name, zeta , when it was borrowed. For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation ; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet and for the sounds in English see English phonetics . Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning

6786-561: The tokens, such as function and variable names start to multiply in complex software development , and there is still a need to keep the source code human-readable, Naming conventions make this possible. So for example, a function dealing with matrix multiplication might formally be called: In each case, the capitalisation or lack thereof supports a different function. In the first, FORTRAN compatibility requires case-insensitive naming and short function names. The second supports easily discernible function and argument names and types, within

6873-405: The two cases of the same letter are used; for example, x may denote an element of a set X . 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

6960-502: The two characters representing the case variants of a letter. (Some old character-encoding systems, such as the Baudot code , are restricted to one set of letters, usually represented by the upper-case variants.) History of the Latin script The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It

7047-425: 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

7134-596: The unit symbol to which it is attached. Lower case is used for all submultiple prefix symbols and the small multiple prefix symbols up to "k" (for kilo , meaning 10 = 1000 multiplier), whereas upper case is used for larger multipliers: Some case styles are not used in standard English, but are common in computer programming , product branding , or other specialised fields. The usage derives from how programming languages are parsed , programmatically. They generally separate their syntactic tokens by simple whitespace , including space characters , tabs , and newlines . When

7221-445: The use of the capitals. Sometimes only vowels are upper case, at other times upper and lower case are alternated, but often it is simply random. The name comes from the sarcastic or ironic implication that it was used in an attempt by the writer to convey their own coolness ( studliness ). It is also used to mock the violation of standard English case conventions by marketers in the naming of computer software packages, even when there

7308-671: The wake of Christianization , being used in Bible translations . It spread to the Americas , Australia , and parts of Asia , Africa , and the Pacific, along with the Spanish , Portuguese , English , French , and Dutch languages. In the late 18th century, the Romanians adopted the Latin alphabet; although Romanian is a Romance language, the Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and until

7395-598: Was adopted in the Old Italic alphabets beginning in the 8th century BC. At that time a simplified three-stroke version, omitting the lowermost stroke, was already found in Western Greek alphabets, and was incorporated into classical Etruscan and Oscan , as well as in the earliest Latin epigraphy (early Latin S ), such as the Duenos inscription . The alternation between three and four (and occasionally more than four) strokes

7482-607: Was also adopted into the early runic alphabet (early form of the s -rune ). Both the Anglo-Saxon runes and the Younger Futhark consistently use the simplified three-stroke version. The letter С of Cyrillic script originates in the lunate form of Sigma. ∑ k = 0 5 k = 0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15 {\displaystyle \sum _{k=0}^{5}k=0+1+2+3+4+5=15} Uppercase Letter case

7569-581: Was previously common in English as well, mainly in the 17th and 18th centuries), while in Romance and most other European languages the names of the days of the week, the names of the months, and adjectives of nationality, religion, and so on normally begin with a lower-case letter. On the other hand, in some languages it is customary to capitalise formal polite pronouns , for example De , Dem ( Danish ), Sie , Ihnen (German), and Vd or Ud (short for usted in Spanish ). Informal communication, such as texting , instant messaging or

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