Capitalization or capitalisation in English grammar is the use of a capital letter at the start of a word. English usage varies from capitalization in other languages.
Capitalization or capitalisation in English grammar is the use of a capital letter at the start of a word. English usage varies from capitalization in other languages.
Old English did not have a distinction between uppercase and lowercase, and at best had embossed or decorated letters indicating sections. Middle English capitalization in manuscripts remained haphazard, and was often done for visual aesthetics more than grammar; in poetry, the first letter of each line of verse is often capitalized. With the development of the printing press in Europe and England capitalization of initial letters and proper nouns became more regularized, [1] perhaps partly to distinguish new sentences in a time where punctuation remained sparse and irregularly used. The plays of Shakespeare show capitalization both of new lines and sentences, proper nouns, and some significant common nouns and verbs. [2]
By the era of Early Modern English, with the influence of continental printing practices after the English Restoration in 1660, printing began to favor more and more capitalization of nouns following German typography. The first lines of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 show major capitalization of most nouns:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. [3]
But by the end of the 18th century with the growth of prescriptive dictionaries and style manuals for English usage, the practice faded in Britain so that by the beginning of the 19th century common nouns were only occasionally capitalized, such as in advertisements. Yet the style lasted as late as the Civil War era in the United States, as some of Emily Dickinson's poems still capitalize many common nouns. [4]
Capital letters are used:
Depending on which style guide is used for capitalization, certain rules regarding specific words, such as prepositions, nouns, and pronouns, apply. In titles, the following words need to be capitalized according to each of the following style guides: [20]
APA Style is a “down” style, meaning that words are lowercase unless there is specific guidance to capitalize them such as words beginning a sentence; proper nouns and trade names; job titles and positions; diseases, disorders, therapies, theories, and related terms; titles of works and headings within works; titles of tests and measures; nouns followed by numerals or letters; names of conditions or groups in an experiment; and names of study factors, variables, and effects. [21]
English usage is not consistent, but generally prepositions and articles are not capitalized: "the Forest of Dean", "Gone with the Wind", "University of Southampton". With some publications "The" forms part of the title: "reading The Times". [23] For a more detailed explanation see Capitalization § Titles.
Generally acronyms and initialisms are capitalized, e.g., "NASA" or "SOS". Sometimes, a minor word such as a preposition is not capitalized within the acronym, such as "WoW" for "World of Warcraft". In some British English style guides, only the initial letter of an acronym is capitalized if the acronym is read as a word, e.g., "Nasa" or "Unesco." [24]
In grammar, the accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb.
Camel case is the practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation and with capitalized words. The format indicates the first word starting with either case, then the following words having an initial uppercase letter. Common examples include YouTube, PowerPoint, HarperCollins, FedEx, iPhone, eBay, and LaGuardia. Camel case is often used as a naming convention in computer programming. It is also sometimes used in online usernames such as JohnSmith, and to make multi-word domain names more legible, for example in promoting EasyWidgetCompany.com. In fact, WikiWikiWeb, an ancestor of Wikipedia, is written in camel case.
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior, sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner.
English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class. Some proper nouns occur in plural form, and then they refer to groups of entities considered as unique. Proper nouns can also occur in secondary applications, for example modifying nouns, or in the role of common nouns. The detailed definition of the term is problematic and, to an extent, governed by convention.
Capitalization or capitalisation is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term also may refer to the choice of the casing applied to text.
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals and smaller lowercase in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size, but for others the shapes are different. The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.
A capitonym is a word that changes its meaning when it is capitalized; the capitalization usually applies due to one form being a proper noun or eponym. It is a portmanteau of the word capital with the suffix -onym. A capitonym is a form of homograph and – when the two forms are pronounced differently – is also a form of heteronym. In situations where both words should be capitalized, there will be nothing to distinguish between them except the context in which they are used.
Title case or headline case is a style of capitalization used for rendering the titles of published works or works of art in English. When using title case, all words are capitalized, except for minor words that are not the first or last word of the title. There are different rules for which words are major, hence capitalized. As an example, a headline might be written like this: "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps over the Lazy Dog".
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.
The iota subscript is a diacritic mark in the Greek alphabet shaped like a small vertical stroke or miniature iota ⟨ι⟩ placed below the letter. It can occur with the vowel letters eta ⟨η⟩, omega ⟨ω⟩, and alpha ⟨α⟩. It represents the former presence of an offglide after the vowel, forming a so‐called "long diphthong". Such diphthongs —phonologically distinct from the corresponding normal or "short" diphthongs —were a feature of ancient Greek in the pre-classical and classical eras.
Traditional grammar is a framework for the description of the structure of a language. The roots of traditional grammar are in the work of classical Greek and Latin philologists. The formal study of grammar based on these models became popular during the Renaissance.
Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Spanish punctuation uniquely includes the use of inverted question and exclamation marks: ⟨¿⟩⟨¡⟩.
The grammar of the Polish language is complex and characterized by a high degree of inflection, and has relatively free word order, although the dominant arrangement is subject–verb–object (SVO). There commonly are no articles, and there is frequent dropping of subject pronouns. Distinctive features include the different treatment of masculine personal nouns in the plural, and the complex grammar of numerals and quantifiers.
Orthographic conventions have varied over time, and vary by publishers, authors, and regional preferences, on whether and when Internet should be capitalized. When the Internet first came into common use, most publications treated Internet as a capitalized proper noun, but this has become less common. This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become familiar. The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global IP-based internet from internets that are smaller or not IP-based, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases, with Internet being preferred in the United States and internet being preferred in the United Kingdom.
In English orthography, the term proper adjective is used to mean adjectives that take initial capital letters, and common adjective to mean those that do not. For example, a person from India is Indian—Indian is a proper adjective.
The morphology of the Welsh language shows many characteristics perhaps unfamiliar to speakers of English or continental European languages like French or German, but has much in common with the other modern Insular Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, and Breton. Welsh is a moderately inflected language. Verbs conjugate for person, tense and mood with affirmative, interrogative and negative conjugations of some verbs. A majority of prepositions inflect for person and number. There are few case inflections in Literary Welsh, being confined to certain pronouns.
The grammar of Modern Hebrew shares similarities with that of its Biblical Hebrew counterpart, but it has evolved significantly over time. Modern Hebrew grammar incorporates analytic, expressing such forms as dative, ablative, and accusative using prepositional particles rather than morphological cases.
In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners or of nouns.
Reverential capitalization is the practice of capitalizing religious words that refer to deities or divine beings in cases where the words would not otherwise have been capitalized. Pronouns are also particularly included in reverential capitalization:
and God calleth to the light 'Day,' and to the darkness He hath called 'Night;' and there is an evening, and there is a morning — day one.
But are the rules for capitalisation in English clear cut? In his detailed account, Tom McArthur (1992) comments that while some people prefer to capitalise the first letter of the first word of a phrase following a colon others keep to lower case.
When any name usually applied to the Supreme Being is used for a created being, it does not begin with a capital; as, "The Lord is a great God above all gods."
Providence is sometimes used to mean God, that is, the One who provides for us; Heaven likewise is used to mean the One who reigns in heaven. In such cases the word should begin with a capital. But if only God's providential care, or his place of abode is meant, a capital is not needed.