Capital Letters

Capital letters are also known as uppercase letters, a term that comes from the days of hand-set printing, when printers kept the large letter blocks in the upper case of a type drawer.

Letters of Williamsburg eighteenth century press

The Romans had no lowercase alphabet: inscriptions on ancient Roman monuments were written entirely in capital letters.

Lowercase letters developed later from quicker, more rounded handwriting styles used by scribes, especially in the Middle Ages.

In German, every noun begins with a capital letter, a custom that became standardized in the 17th and 18th centuries.

English once used capitals much more freely than it does now; 18th-century books often capitalized many nouns for emphasis.

The first word of a sentence is capitalized in English mainly to help readers see quickly where a new sentence begins.

The expression "mind your Ps and Qs" is sometimes linked, probably wrongly, to printers having to distinguish similar-looking lowercase letters when setting type.

On old typewriters, producing a capital letter required holding down the Shift key, which physically shifted the mechanism so the uppercase character struck the paper.

In writing on the internet, whole words in capital letters are often read as shouting.

Many modern brand names play with capitals in distinctive ways, such as eBay and iPhone, though standard style guides often regularize such spellings at the start of sentences.