Majuscule and Minuscule: Capital and Lowercase Letters

Majuscule and minuscule are the formal names for the two cases of the Latin alphabet. A majuscule is a large letter, what most people call a capital: A B C. A minuscule is a small letter: a b c. The words come from Latin majusculus and minusculus, meaning “somewhat larger” and “somewhat smaller”. Scholars of manuscripts use them because “capital” also means something more specific, a letter that begins a sentence or name, and not all large letters in medieval manuscripts did that.

How two cases came about

The Romans wrote in capitals. Roman inscriptions, such as those on monuments, are in what we now call majuscule forms, with straight, geometric strokes that suit chiselling in stone. For everyday writing, scribes used faster cursive shapes that gradually shifted and shortened. Between the late Roman period and the early Middle Ages book scripts such as uncial and half-uncial developed round forms, and the half-uncial already looks like the ancestor of lowercase.

In the late 8th and 9th centuries, scribes working under the Carolingian court standardised a clear, regular small-letter script now called Carolingian minuscule. Renaissance humanists later mistook it for a Roman script and copied it, and printers cut type from their hand. That is the reason modern lowercase letters resemble 9th-century handwriting, while our capitals resemble first-century Roman inscriptions. The pairing is a historic blend.

Upper and lower case in the print shop

In hand-set printing a compositor kept two wooden cases of type. The capitals went in the upper case, the small letters in the lower case, nearest the hand because they were used more often. The terms uppercase and lowercase are those drawers. Other typography words, such as kerning and leading, also come from metal type.

Anatomy of the two cases

The two sets have different proportions and vertical structure:

Majuscules sit between the baseline and the cap height, with few parts above or below.
Minuscules are built around the x-height, with ascenders on b d f h k l and descenders on g j p q y, which creates the irregular outline that helps readers recognise whole words.

That outline is why all-capital text is slower to read: a row of capitals makes rectangular word shapes that give fewer clues. It is also why blackletter in all caps is almost unreadable, and why Old English text style is best set in lowercase, with capitals for the first letters of names.

Case in lettering and handwriting

When you hand-letter a quote, you choose where to use each case. All capitals give a formal, monumental look. Lowercase gives a conversational tone. Mixing a script lowercase with a block capital is a standard pairing. In cursive handwriting the two cases are taught as separate alphabets, since cursive capitals are very different from the print capitals. See our guides on cursive sentences for how capital and lowercase letters connect in a line.

Case in Unicode

Unicode treats case as a relationship between code points. A is U+0041 and a is U+0061; software maps between them when you press caps lock. A few edge cases show how this is not always one to one:

The German ß becomes SS in capitals, and the single letter capital sharp s (ẞ, U+1E9E) was added in Unicode 5.1 as an optional alternative.
A titlecase form exists for a few digraph characters, such as ǅ (U+01C5), which is neither all capital nor all small.
Turkish has dotted and dotless i, so uppercasing i should produce İ in Turkish and I in English. Software that ignores the language gets Turkish wrong.

Fancy Unicode styles work on the same underlying letters. The small caps generator converts lowercase to small capital letters, while the bold and cursive styles have separate capital and lowercase forms.

Common confusions

Capital is not the same as majuscule. Capital describes function, majuscule describes form.
Small caps are not minuscule. They are capital shapes at lowercase height.
A unicameral script has no cases. Arabic and Devanagari have no capitals to speak of.

Frequently asked questions

Why are they called uppercase and lowercase?

The terms come from the printing trade. Compositors stored capital letters in the upper of two wooden type cases and the small letters in the lower case, which sat closer at hand because lowercase was used far more. The names stuck once the equipment disappeared, and are now used by every word processor.

Which came first, majuscule or minuscule?

Majuscule. Roman inscriptions used capitals only, and early book hands such as uncial and half-uncial were also majuscule or close to it. Minuscule developed gradually as faster writing shortened and joined letters, and was standardised in Carolingian minuscule around the 9th century, from which modern lowercase descends.

Do all alphabets have capital and lowercase letters?

No. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian and Coptic have two cases. Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai and the Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts do not. The word for a script with two cases is bicameral and for one case unicameral. Georgian is a special case: its older capital-like forms fell out of everyday use, and modern Georgian text is normally set in a single case.

Is there a typeface with only one case?

Yes, a unicase font mixes capital and lowercase shapes into a single set, so there is no distinction. Examples exist in display type and in some 20th century experimental alphabets, such as Herbert Bayer's Universal alphabet, which had no capitals at all.