Editor's Corner

Note: This is a lengthier article than usual, but Editor’s Corner may be a little sporadic over the next few days. Read it slowly to make it last. 🙂

When it comes to language, there is no such thing as a short answer. Today I picked a question out of my mailbox that seemed like an easy one…but once I got started on research I found myself down another rabbit hole of information. Today’s topic is “case.” I’m just sharing tidbits of information, but for a longer article on the topic see Letter Case.

Most languages based on Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, and Coptic alphabets use upper and lower cases to clarify writing. Scripts with both upper and lower cases are called bicameral scripts. Hebrew and Arabic, when written, only use one case and are called unicase scripts.

Before the terms uppercase and lowercase were coined, the term for capital letters was majuscule and the term for lowercase letters was minuscule. The terms for case were developed during the time of the printing press. Typesetters kept shallow wooden or metal drawers (called cases) with the letters in them. The majuscule letters were in the top (upper) case; the miniscule letters in the bottom (lower) case.

Typesetter’s Case

That gives us uppercase and lowercase, but what about all these other cases we hear about? Sentence case? Camel case? Title case? Well, here’s a brief explanation.

Sentence case and title case are the two standard “cases” you will find defined in style guides. The others are more recent inventions of the computer age, designed as part of file naming conventions.

· Sentence case: The case used for prose. The first letter of the sentence begins with a capital letter and uses lowercase letters for the rest of the sentence (unless you run into a proper noun). The sentence ends with some sort of terminal punctuation (e.g., period, question mark).

Example: The little dog found an old hamburger in the gutter.

· Title case: The case used for titles of books, TV shows, works of art, music, etc. Capitalization depends on the style guide used, but generally includes rules such as:

· first and last word capitalized

· nouns capitalized

· adjectives capitalized

· prepositions lowercased

· conjunctions lowercased

· etc.

Example: Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

· Toggle case: An option in Microsoft® Word that allows you to flip the case of words you’ve typed. For example, if you have turned on Caps Lock by mistake and end up typing “tHE mAN OF lA mANCHA,” you can select the text, click Toggle Case, and it will change it to “The Man of La Mancha.”

· Camel case: I’ve only seen this as a file naming convention. Named camel case because of the humps created by having capital letters in the middle of a string of lowercase letters. Camel case requires that you capitalize the first letter of each new word, and cram the words altogether.

Example: A Word document called Backing Up Your Data would be saved in camel case as: BackingUpYourData.

· Snake case: According to Wikipedia, this case can be used for variable names, file names, and function names. The “case” involves removing punctuation and spaces and replacing them with underscores. The words can be all lowercase, all uppercase, or mixed case.

Examples:

007_UNDERCOVER_FILE

007_undercover_file

007_Undercover_file

· Spinal case: Similar to “snake case,” only the underscore marks are replaced by hyphens.

Examples:

THE-SECRET-OF-THE-HOLY-GRAIL

the-secret-of-the-holy-grail

The-secret-of-the-holy-grail

Kara Church

Senior Technical Editor