Capital letters or majuscules (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, D, ...) are one type of case in a writing system. Capital letters (also simply called capitals or caps) are also known as upper case; manual typesetters kept them in the upper drawers of a desk, keeping the more frequently used minuscule letters on the lower shelf. This practice may date back to Johann Gutenberg.

Most writing systems make no distinction between capital and lowercase letters, such as the Arabic, Chinese, and Devanagari writing systems. Indeed, even European languages did not make this distinction before about 1300; both majuscule and minuscule letters existed, but a given text would use either one or the other.

Usage

In alphabets with a case distinction, capitals are used for:

1. Capitalization,
2. Acronyms,
3. Supposed better legibility, for example on signs and in labeling (but see Ascender), and
4. Emphasis (in some languages).

Capital letters were sometimes used for typographical emphasis in text made on a typewriter. However, long spans of text in all upper-case are harder to read because of the absence of the ascenders and descenders found in lower-case letters, which can aid recognition. With the advent of modern computer editing technology and the Internet, emphasis is usually indicated by use of a single word Capital, italic, or bold font, similar to what has long been common practice in print. When an acronym or initialism requires a string of upper-case letters, it is frequently set in small capitals, to avoid overemphasizing the word in mostly lower-case running text. (By contrast, the "small print" in legal documents is often capitalized to make it harder to read.) In electronic communications, it is often considered very poor "netiquette" to type in all capitals, because it can be harder to read and because it is seen as tantamount to shouting. Indeed, this is the oft-used name for the practice.

Capitalization is the writing of a word with its first letter in upper-case and the remaining letters in lower-case. Capitalization rules vary by language and are often quite complex, but in most modern languages that have capitalization, the first word of every sentence is capitalized, as are all proper nouns. Some languages, such as German, capitalize the first letter of all nouns; this was previously common in English as well. (See the article on capitalization for a detailed list of norms).

Other meanings

For paleographers, a Majuscule script is any script in which the letters have very few or very short ascenders and descenders, or none at all (for example, the majuscule scripts used in the Codex Vaticanus, or the Book of Kells).

See also

• All caps
• CamelCase
• Start Case
• Letter case
• Roman square capitals
• Small caps

External links

• Codex Vaticanus B/03 Detailed description of Codex Vaticanus with many images.
• All-caps is harder to read
• Capitals, a Primer of Information About Capitalization With Some Practical Typographic Hints as to The Use Of Capitals by Frederick W. Hamilton, 1918, from Project Gutenberg

•  • [ e] Typography terminology
Page	Pagination Recto Verso Margin Column Canons of page construction	Lowercase 'a' in Adobe Caslon
Paragraph	Widows and orphans Leading River Baseline Median Alignment Justification
Character	Ligature Letter-spacing Kerning Majuscule Minuscule Initial x-height Ascender Descender Diacritics Counter Subscript Superscript
Style	Serif Italic Slab serif Sans-serif Blackletter Script Dingbat
Punctuation	Hanging punctuation Hyphenation Curly quotes En dash Em dash
Typesetting	Type design Type foundry Movable type Calligraphy Phototypesetting Letterpress Typeface Font Computer font Point Pica Cicero Em En Lorem ipsum Hamburgefonts Punchcutting
	Character encoding Rasterization Hinting