A list of the most common case types used in writing, typography, and coding/programming:
- Capitalization: is the act of capitalizing letters. It’s when the first letter of a word is uppercase the rest is lower case.
- Sentence case: The first letter of the first word of a new sentence (after a period
.) is always uppercase (capitalized). - Title Case: all words in a title (like an article headline) are capitalized, except words like “on, in, a, and”, etc.
- Lowercase: all letters in a sentence are lower case.
- ALL CAPS: Every letter in every word is capitalized (uppercase). Used for heavy emphasis, and should generally be avoided in conversation, BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING (LIKE AN IDIOT).
- small-caps: every letter is capitalized but the size is the same as lowercase letters from the same font-family. Small caps is the nicer, less aggressive cousin of all caps.
- CamelCase: words have no space between them in a sentence, instead the first letter of each word is capitalized.
- lowerCamelCase: a version fo CamelCase where the first letter is lowercase, followed by uppercase, e.g. iPhone. This type of case is commonly used by programmers for declaring variables an function names. It’s usually referred to as just camelCase (not lowerCamelCase).
- SNAKE_CASE: using underscore
_instead of punctuation and spaces to separate words in a sentence. Letters should either be only UPPERCASE or only lowercase.
