lowercased

Lowercased refers to text that has been converted to lowercase, meaning that every letter is transformed to its lowercase variant. For example, "Hello" becomes "hello" and "JavaScript" becomes "javascript". In many workflows, lowercasing is part of normalization to enable case-insensitive comparison, matching, and indexing.

Programming languages provide functions to perform lowercase conversion, such as toLowerCase in JavaScript, lower in Python, and strtolower in PHP. Unicode-aware lowercasing relies on comprehensive case mappings, which can vary by language and locale. In some contexts, case folding—an operation related to caseless matching—offers a more aggressive, language-insensitive normalization than simple lowercasing.

Locale-aware lowercasing recognizes language-specific rules, for example Turkish and Azerbaijani where I and i map differently, or Greek where final sigma has distinct lowercase forms. Because mappings are defined by the Unicode standard, different implementations can yield different results for certain characters. Therefore, for robust text comparisons across languages, developers may use case folding or dedicated locale-aware libraries, and should be aware that lowercasing alone does not guarantee accent-insensitive or locale-accurate ordering. The term "lowercased text" is commonly used in data cleaning, search indexing, and user input processing to standardize input before comparisons.