lowercase

Lowercase refers to the small letters of a script that distinguishes case from uppercase (capital) letters. In Latin-based alphabets, lowercase letters are the non-capital forms used for ordinary text, while uppercase letters signal proper nouns, sentence starts, acronyms, and emphasis.

Historically, the term lowercase comes from the practice of printing with two cases. Uppercase letters were kept in an upper case; the more common, smaller forms in a lower case. When movable type was used, body text was set in lowercase, with capitals reserved for emphasis or proper nouns. This arrangement helped organize type and later influenced typography conventions that favor lowercase for body text.

Lowercase letters are defined by features such as x-height, ascenders, and descenders. Letter shapes vary by alphabet and font, but the concept of a distinct lowercase set is common to Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts, often with diacritics.

In modern usage, lowercase forms constitute the majority of ordinary text. Style guides establish capitalization rules for sentences and proper nouns. In computing, case matters: many programming languages are case sensitive, and URLs or file paths may be case-sensitive; case folding and normalization are common in text processing.