Uppercase (or capital letters) are the taller and larger variants of alphabetical letters, as opposed to lowercase letters (or minuscule).

Linguistically speaking, a capital is not to be confused with a majuscule, which is a capital letter with the specific function of being used at the beginning of a sentence or a word.

HISTORY

Capital letterforms derive from Phoenician and Greek alphabets when the Roman Empire started its influence over Europe around the 1st century.

During the Roman Empire, they were painted and/or carved in stone at large sizes for inscriptions on monuments, buildings, and tombstones (called Capitalis Monumentalis).

Through time, with the need to write faster, some shapes evolved, resulting in minuscule (lowercase) letters. But that didn’t make capital letters disappear. On the contrary, they kept coexisting with minuscules. Each has its own specific functions and looks very different, so using both allows a more comfortable reading experience.

The word ending with -case is a legacy from metal type printing when letters (or types) were sorted by categories into cases (one per glyph), themselves into drawers (one per font). Capitals were placed in the cases of the upper section of the drawers, minuscules were on the lower part.

Not to be confused with a majuscule letter.