Typography Glossary

Definitions of typography and text formatting terms related to case conversion.

Alternating Case

A text style where letters alternate between uppercase and lowercase (e.g., aLtErNaTiNg). Often used for stylistic effect in informal contexts.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A character encoding standard where uppercase letters (A-Z) are encoded as values 65-90 and lowercase (a-z) as 97-122.

Baseline

The invisible line on which characters sit. Descenders (like g, p, y) extend below this line.

Bicameral

A writing system that has two cases (uppercase and lowercase). Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets are bicameral. Many Asian scripts are unicameral (no case distinction).

camelCase

A naming convention where words are joined without spaces, with each word except the first starting with a capital letter (e.g., camelCase, firstName, getUserName). Common in JavaScript and Java.

Capital Letters

Uppercase letters. Also called majuscules. The larger letter forms typically used at the beginning of sentences and proper nouns (A, B, C).

Case Sensitivity

Whether a system distinguishes between uppercase and lowercase letters. Case-sensitive systems treat "ABC" and "abc" as different values.

Capitalize

To convert a letter or word to uppercase, or to write with an initial capital letter.

Cap Height

The height of capital letters measured from the baseline to the top of flat capitals like H or M.

Character Encoding

A system that assigns numeric codes to characters. Different encodings may have different codes for the same letter.

Descender

The part of a lowercase letter that extends below the baseline (g, j, p, q, y).

Headline Case

Another term for title case. Capitalize major words in titles and headings while keeping minor words lowercase.

Inverse Case

Converting text by swapping the case of each letter. Uppercase becomes lowercase and lowercase becomes uppercase. Useful for fixing caps lock mistakes.

kebab-case

A naming convention using lowercase letters with words separated by hyphens (e.g., kebab-case, user-profile, get-all-items). Common in URLs and CSS class names.

Letter Case

The distinction between uppercase (capital) and lowercase (small) letter forms. Origins trace to printing where cases held different letter types.

Lowercase

The smaller letter forms (a, b, c). Also called minuscules. Derived from the lower case in printing where these letters were stored.

Majuscule

Technical term for uppercase or capital letters. From Latin meaning "somewhat larger."

Minuscule

Technical term for lowercase or small letters. From Latin meaning "somewhat smaller."

Mixed Case

Text containing both uppercase and lowercase letters in various patterns, not following a standard convention.

PascalCase

A naming convention where all words are joined without spaces and each word starts with a capital letter (e.g., PascalCase, FirstName, GetUserName). Common for class names in programming.

Proper Case

Another term for title case or capitalize words, where the first letter of each word is capitalized.

Sentence Case

Capitalization style where only the first letter of the first word in a sentence is capitalized, along with proper nouns. Standard for most regular text.

Small Caps

Uppercase letters that are the same height as lowercase letters. Often used for abbreviations or stylistic effect in typography.

snake_case

A naming convention using lowercase letters with words separated by underscores (e.g., snake_case, user_name, get_all_items). Common in Python and databases.

SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE

snake_case written in all capitals (e.g., MAX_SIZE, DATABASE_URL). Commonly used for constants in programming.

Start Case

Another term for capitalizing the first letter of every word, regardless of word type.

String

A sequence of characters in programming. Case conversion operations are typically applied to strings.

Title Case

Capitalization style for titles and headings where major words are capitalized and minor words (articles, short prepositions, conjunctions) remain lowercase unless starting the title.

Toggle Case

Another name for inverse case, where each letter's case is swapped.

Unicode

Modern character encoding standard that supports virtually all writing systems. Defines case mappings for letters across many scripts.

Uppercase

The larger capital letter forms (A, B, C). Also called majuscules or capitals. From the upper case in printing where these letters were stored.

X-height

The height of lowercase letters without ascenders or descenders (like x, a, e). An important metric in typography.