All caps

For the song, see All Caps (song).

In typography, all caps (short for all capitals or all capitalized; often written as ALL CAPS) refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters.

All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, advertising, billboards, and in dramatic newspaper headlines. Short strings of words in all caps appear bolder and "louder" than mixed case. All caps is also used to indicate that a given word is an acronym.

Usage

Print media

Bilingual sign in Ireland. The eclipsis of P to bP uses lowercase in an otherwise all-caps text

Before the development of lower case letters in the 8th century, texts in the Latin alphabet were written in a single case, which is now considered to be capital letters. However, the shapes of words set in lowercase provide a valuable cue to readers that helps speed the process of reading; type in all caps forms a rectangular shape for every word, which makes distinguishing words harder. As a result, text in all caps is not widely used in body copy, as it is difficult to read in extended passages. The major exception to this is so-called small print in advertisements and legal documents, where the typesetter has incentive to make the text inaccessible.

Internet

This form of typography also appears in on-line forums. It was once an inevitable byproduct of using machines with limited support for lowercase text (such as certain dumb terminals, early Apple II models), but as full support of ASCII became standard, it became solely identified with "shouting" or attention-seeking behaviour. As a result, netiquette generally discourages the use of all caps.

Surnames

A practice exists of distinguishing the surname from the rest of a personal name by stylizing the surname only in all caps. This clarification can help a reader with unfamiliar names and name order.

Other

Writing in all caps (possibly with underscores replacing spaces) is an identifier naming convention in many programming languages that symbolizes that the given identifier represents a constant.

In CSS

All caps can be specified in CSS using "text-transform: uppercase;". For example, the HTML

<span style="text-transform: uppercase;">Jane Doe</span>

renders as

Jane Doe

In many cases this is better than typing text directly in capitals, because one can easily change text style (e.g. replace all-caps with bold or colored font) if deemed necessary.

See also

• Caps lock
• CamelCase
• Letter case
• Roman square capitals
• Shift key
• Small caps
• Unicase