Small Caps Generator

This small caps generator converts typed text into Unicode small capital letters, such as ɢᴏʟᴅᴇɴ ʜᴏᴜʀ, that you copy and paste into a bio, nickname, caption or game name. It covers nearly the whole alphabet, shows what stands in for Q and X, and runs in your browser.

How to use the small caps generator

1. Type or paste your text in the box at the top. Capitals and lowercase both become small capitals.
2. Check the Small Caps row, and compare it with superscript or bold sans if you want a different feel.
3. Tap Copy and paste it into your bio, nickname or caption.

What you get

Small caps look like capital letters scaled down to the height of lowercase. In a bio, ᴍʏ ᴄᴏꜰꜰᴇᴇ ʀᴏᴜᴛɪɴᴇ reads calmer than MY COFFEE ROUTINE and cleaner than lowercase, which is why small caps are a staple of minimal, aesthetic and gaming names. Type your text above and every letter converts: capitals and lowercase both give the same small capitals, so “Maya Lopez” and “maya lopez” come out identical.

Compared with the other tiny styles, small caps keep their letters on the baseline and cover nearly the whole alphabet. Superscript rides high; subscript has only 17 letters.

The alphabet, its sources and the gaps

The small capitals were not designed as one font. They were collected over twenty years from the International Phonetic Alphabet and from phonetic extension blocks.

Two gaps are worth understanding:

• Q. A real LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL Q, ꞯ (U+A7AF), was added in 2018 (Unicode 11). Because it is new, fonts rarely include it, and in many apps it shows as an empty box. The generator uses ǫ so the word still reads. If you are certain your audience has recent fonts, you can paste ꞯ yourself.
• X. No small capital x was ever encoded. A plain lowercase x is the same height, so the line stays level, but its shape is a lowercase x rather than a capital X. The difference is nearly invisible.

Another quirk: ꜰ and ꜱ were added to Latin Extended-D, a later block than the rest. They are almost always present on current phones, but on very old systems they are the first to turn into boxes.

Why Unicode small caps are not typographic small caps

Real small caps are a feature of a typeface. In professional fonts with OpenType support, the smcp feature substitutes properly designed small capitals, which are slightly wider and heavier than scaled-down capitals so they match the stroke weight of the text around them. The c2sc feature does the same for capitals. In CSS you get this through font-variant: small-caps; if the font lacks the feature, browsers synthesise it by shrinking capitals, which usually looks too light.

Unicode small caps are different. They are separate characters pulled from phonetic alphabets, drawn by whatever font your device uses. As a result:

Use formatting where you can, such as a document, a website or a printed menu. Use Unicode where you cannot: a social bio, a nickname, a game field, a plain-text email.

Where small caps get used

• Minimal bios. Name, city and one-line description in small caps, with a bullet or slash between them: ᴘʜᴏᴛᴏɢʀᴀᴘʜᴇʀ · ʟɪꜱʙᴏɴ.
• Gaming names. Small caps are a common base for tag names and clan names because they look sharp at nameplate size. Games draw names with their own fonts, so test first; our BGMI and PUBG Mobile name style page explains the box problem in detail.
• Minecraft. Players use small caps in server names, signs and books. Support depends on the version and font, and we have not tested every combination, so paste a test line first.
• Aesthetic captions. Small caps work as a quiet label under a larger cursive line. More looks like this are on the aesthetic fonts page.

Where small caps come from in print

Small caps belong to a long typographic tradition. In book design they are used for acronyms inside running text (so NASA does not shout), for the first words of a chapter, for running heads and for names in bibliographies. A designer chooses a typeface that includes true small caps, which are drawn wider and heavier than shrunken capitals so that they blend with the text. On the web, the CSS property font-variant-caps: small-caps asks the font for them and, where they are missing, the browser fakes them, which usually looks thin.

Unicode small caps borrow only the idea. They are closest to the typographic form in a font that draws the phonetic letters with the same weight as its capitals, and furthest in a font that treats them as an afterthought. If two letters in the same word look different in weight, that is the font, not the generator.

Keep it legible

• Short beats long. Small capitals have no ascenders or descenders, so long lines flatten out. A name or one short line reads well; a full paragraph does not.
• Keep acronyms plain. Letters such as ǫ and the omitted x can cause a spelling to look odd, so words heavy in Q or X (QUIZ, EXAM) look slightly off.
• Keep key information plain. Phone numbers, addresses, dates, prices and links should be in ordinary characters; assistive technology and search both handle those better.
• Check once on a second device. If a letter shows as a box, replace the word with something simpler.

Other small styles

Raised letters live in the superscript generator, and maths indices in the subscript generator. The small text generator puts all three together, and a fancy-text-to-normal converter can reverse any of them.

For a quiet label under a larger style, the small caps generator is the simplest option here, as long as your key words stay in plain text.