Wordcase

Wordcase is a term used to describe the capitalization pattern applied to words in a text. It covers how letters are rendered in terms of case, including whether they are written in lowercase, uppercase, or capitalized in various schemes.

Common forms of wordcase include lower case (all letters are lowercase), upper case (all letters are uppercase), title case (the main words are capitalized, with some style guides excluding certain short words), and sentence case (the first word of a sentence is capitalized with the rest in lowercase). In programming and typesetting, wordcase is often extended to include identifiers and styles such as camel case or snake case, though these are more about formatting conventions than traditional textual capitalization.

In computing, wordcase transformations are routine operations. Text processing libraries commonly offer functions to convert strings to lower case, to upper case, or to apply title case. These operations may be locale-aware to handle language-specific rules. For example, Python provides lower(), upper(), and title() methods, while many languages implement equivalent functions in their standard libraries.

In typography and publishing, the choice of wordcase is guided by style guides, editorial standards, and language norms. Title case conventions differ across guides, and decisions about capitalizing proper nouns, acronyms, and hyphenated terms can vary. In multilingual contexts, capitalization rules also differ by language, adding complexity to automated processing.

In natural language processing, case information can aid tasks like named-entity recognition, though some pipelines normalize or fold case to reduce data sparsity. Overall, wordcase is a fundamental aspect of how text appears and is processed across writing, publishing, and computing.