Letter case facts for kids

Letter case is all about the difference between big letters (like A, B, C) and small letters (like a, b, c) in some writing systems. You might know them as uppercase and lowercase letters.

The name "letter case" comes from the old days of printing. Printers used to keep their metal letters in special drawers. The big, capital letters were stored in the "upper case" drawer, and the small letters were in the "lower case" drawer.

The fancy names for these are "majuscule" (for big letters) and "minuscule" (for small letters). Writing systems that use letter case include the Latin alphabet (which English uses), the Greek alphabet, and the Cyrillic alphabet (used in Russian, for example).

A Bit of History

When the very first alphabets were created, they only had capital letters. Imagine writing everything in all caps!

Over time, especially during the Middle Ages, people started developing smaller, simpler versions of letters. This made it much faster to write by hand. These new, smaller letters became what we now call lowercase letters.

For a long time, many European languages didn't have clear rules about when to use big or small letters. It wasn't until around the year 1300 that these differences became more common and organized, especially outside of Greek and Latin.

Capitalization Rules

Different languages have their own unique rules for when to use capital letters. It can be a bit tricky!

For example, in German, you always capitalize all nouns. So, if you wanted to say "the car," German would write it as "das Auto" (with a capital A for Auto).

But in English, we only capitalize proper nouns. These are specific names of people, places, or things, like "Sarah," "London," or "Mount Everest." We wouldn't capitalize "car" unless it was at the start of a sentence.

However, there's one rule that almost all languages with letter case follow: you nearly always capitalize the very first letter of the first word in every sentence. It's like a signal that a new thought is beginning!

Images for kids

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  Handwritten Cyrillic script

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  Adyghe Latin alphabet, used between 1927 and 1938, was based on Latin script, but did not have capital letters, being unicameral.

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  Steve Jobs's signature as seen on the inner side of the original Macintosh, using lower case cursive