The Surprisingly Literal Reason We Call Letters “Uppercase” and “Lowercase”

The origin of the terms uppercase and lowercase might seem pretty self-explanatory. Upper and lower must be references to the height of the letters, and the use of case is presumably an offshoot of its “condition” sense.

But that’s actually not the case.

1. From Majuscule to Minuscule
2. Capitals on a Case-by-Case Basis

From Majuscule to Minuscule

Many writing systems—including Hebrew, Arabic, and Korean (a.k.a. Hangul), among others—don’t distinguish between upper and lower case at all. And even those that do haven’t been using those terms for very long, relative to how old the concepts are.

In paleography, upper- and lowercase scripts are known as majuscule and minuscule, respectively. Majuscule derives from the Latin word maiusculus, meaning “somewhat larger,” and minuscule maps to minusculus, or “rather small.” People didn’t always use a combination of the two. Ancient Greek and Roman scribes initially wrote only in majuscule: rows upon rows of blockish letters that fit precisely between two imaginary lines. We’d consider it all-caps—they just didn’t really have an alternative.

Then, as early as the 1st century CE, minuscule began to emerge: smaller, rounder letters that required fewer strokes. You could write them more quickly than their majuscule counterparts because the letters were easily strung together as cursive (though cursive majuscule did exist). Minuscule features lots of ascenders and descenders—strokes that extend above the median letter height and below the baseline. The stem of a b or k, for example, is an ascender, while the tail of a g or p is a descender.

The earliest evidence of minuscule script wasn’t found in books, but in aspects of daily life: on pottery in Gaul, on walls in Pompeii, etc. This suggests that minuscule may have been invented by regular folks rather than scribes. Eventually, versions of minuscule caught on among scribes, too, though it took hundreds of years for it to truly unseat majuscule as the de facto script for formal works.

It’s impossible to compress centuries of writing and countless variations of majuscule and minuscule scripts into some tidy evolutionary timeline, but certain milestones do stand out. One was the development of Carolingian minuscule, part of Charlemagne’s 8th- and 9th-century push to reform education and standardize the production of Latin texts across Europe.

Other minuscules grew out of Carolingian, including the Gothic black-letter style so familiar from medieval works. During the Renaissance, the humanists re-embraced Carolingian minuscule, which they mistakenly assumed had originated in ancient Rome. But even as minuscule reigned supreme, it was still common to start sentences and key words with oversized letters for flair and emphasis—capital letters, as they’ve been called since the 14th century.

We’ve preserved this bicameral custom in our current system of upper and lower cases. As for where we got those names, look to the printing press.

Capitals on a Case-by-Case Basis

Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century printing press introduced Europe to the wondrous convenience of movable type (something China had worked out several centuries earlier). Each mold bore only one letter or character, so you could reuse a set indefinitely just by rearranging them. Printers stored their letters in trays known as cases: Capital letters went in the upper case, and minuscule ones went in the lower case. In other words, the upper case was literally just a case situated above the lower case.

“The Upper Case and the Lower-Case are of an equal length, breadth, and depth,” Joseph Moxon wrote in his 1683 work Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, that’s the earliest known reference to upper case and lower case. People wasted no time in applying the terms to the two types of letters, rather than only using them for the physical cases themselves. In the very same book, Moxon mentioned setting “a Word of great Emphasis … in the Lower Case” with “the first Letter a Capital.”

At the time, deciding what constituted “a Word of great Emphasis” was pretty much up to you. Moxon said as much in his advice on title pages: The printer could set words however “best pleases his fancy, or is in present mode” (i.e., whatever’s in style at the moment). More nouns got capitalized than other parts of speech, but there weren’t strict rules about when to do so.

“Books appeared in which all or most nouns were given an initial capital (as is done systematically in modern German)—perhaps for aesthetic reasons, or perhaps because printers were uncertain about which nouns to capitalize, and so capitalized them all,” linguist David Crystal wrote in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. “However, the later 18th-century grammarians were not amused by this apparent lack of order and discipline in the written language. In their view, the proliferation of capitals was unnecessary, and causing the loss of a useful potential distinction. Their rules brought a dramatic reduction in the types of noun permitted to take a capital letter.”

The trend has continued to shift toward the lower case. Contemporary style guides generally don’t even capitalize president unless it directly precedes a name; e.g, George Washington, the first president of the United States, was succeeded by President John Adams. The Associated Press goes so far as to lowercase the french of french fries, because it “refers to the style of cut, not the nation.” These days, printers don’t have to reach into their upper case in order to break that rule.

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