allcapital

Allcapital, often written as all-caps or all-caps, is a typographic term describing text rendered entirely in uppercase letters. The term is used to describe a style choice rather than a distinct font class, and it is commonly applied in headlines, branding, signage, and user interfaces. The concept derives from the traditional distinction between capital letters (uppercase) and small letters (lowercase), with capitals historically used for inscriptions and emphasis.

Usage and effect: Allcapital is frequently employed to convey emphasis, formality, urgency, or branding authority. It is common for acronyms and initialisms (for example, NASA or HTML) to appear in all caps. However, many designers avoid long passages in all caps because the uniform letter shapes can hinder readability and slow reading speed compared with mixed-case text. In body text, all-caps is generally discouraged, while it may be used sparingly for short headings or logos.

Design considerations: When used, increased letter-spacing (tracking) can improve legibility, and some designers opt for fonts that offer true small caps to achieve a similar emphasis without full capitalization. In digital contexts, CSS text-transform: uppercase is a common way to render allcaps visually, but it can affect accessibility and search indexing because the underlying text remains unchanged.

See also: capitalization, title case, sentence case, small caps.