Free US Law Dictionary

Capitalization

Capitalization (or capitalisation — see spelling differences) is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule (upper case letter) and the remaining letters in minuscules (lower case letters), in those writing systems which have a case distinction. The term is also used more broadly to refer to any aspect of using upper and lower case letters.

Different language orthographies have different conventions for the use of capitalization. The systematic use of capitalized and uncapitalized words in running text is called "mixed case". Conventions for the capitalization of titles vary among languages and different style guides.

Capitalized words contrast with words in all caps. Mixed case text may also be written in capitals and small caps.

In some representations of certain writing systems, the notion of the "first letter" is subtle: for example, the Croatian digraph 'lj' is considered as a single orthographic letter, and has a representation as a single Unicode character, but as a capitalized initial, it is written 'Lj', while in an all-caps text, it is written 'LJ'. The 'Lj' form is called title case.