Small caps

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In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are letters or other symbols that have the graphic form of uppercase letters but which are typeset at a smaller size, approaching or matching the height of lowercase letters or text figures in the text.^[1] For example, the text "The quick brown fox" appears as The quick brown fox in small caps. Small caps are used in running text as a form of emphasis that is less dominant than all uppercase text, and as a method of emphasis or distinctiveness for text alongside or instead of italics, or when boldface is inappropriate. Small caps can be used to draw attention to the opening phrase or line of a new section of text, or to provide an additional style in a dictionary entry where many parts must be typographically differentiated.

Well-designed small capitals are not simply scaled-down versions of normal capitals; they normally retain the same stroke weight as other letters and have a wider aspect ratio for readability.

Typically, the height of a small capital glyph will be one ex, the same height as most lowercase characters in the font. In fonts with relatively low x-height, however, small caps may be somewhat larger than this. For example, in some Tiro Typeworks fonts, small caps glyphs are 30% larger than x-height, and 70% the height of full capitals. To differentiate between these two alternatives, the x-height form is sometimes called petite caps,^[2] preserving the name "small caps" for the larger variant. OpenType fonts can define both forms via the "small caps" and the "petite caps" features. When the support for the petite caps feature is absent from a desktop publishing program, x-height small caps are often substituted.

Many word processors and text formatting systems include an option to format text in caps and small caps, which leaves uppercase letters as they are, but converts lowercase letters to small caps. How this is implemented depends on the typesetting system; some can use true small caps glyphs that are included in modern professional typefaces; but less complex computer fonts do not have small-caps glyphs, so the typesetting system simply reduces the uppercase letters by a fraction (often 1.5 to 2 points less than the base scale). However, this will make the characters look somewhat out of proportion. A work-around to simulate real small capitals is to use a bolder version of the small caps generated by such systems, to match well with the normal weights of capitals and lowercase, especially when such small caps are extended about 5% or letter-spaced a half point or a point.

Uses

Sometimes, small caps are used to indicate an emphasis stronger than italics, but less than all caps.^{[3]: 140 [a][b]} Small caps are also often used, however, in sections of text that are unremarkable, where a run of uppercase capital letters might imply an emphasis that is not intended. For example, the style of some publications, like The New Yorker and The Economist, is to use small caps for acronyms and initialisms longer than three letters^[7][8]—thus "U.S." and "W.H.O." in normal caps but "nato" in small caps.

The initialisms ad, ce, am, and pm are sometimes typeset in small caps.^[9][10]

In printed plays small caps are used for stage directions and the names of characters before their lines.^[11]

Some publications use small caps to indicate surnames. An elementary example is Don Quixote de La Mancha. In the 21st century, the practice is gaining traction in scientific publications.^[12]

In many versions of the Old Testament of the Bible, the word "Lord" is set in small caps.^[13] Typically, an ordinary "Lord" corresponds to the use of the word Adonai in the original Hebrew, but the small caps "Lord" corresponds to the use of Yahweh in the original; in some versions the compound "Lord God" represents the Hebrew compound Adonai Yahweh.^{[citation needed]}

In zoological and botanical nomenclature, the small caps are occasionally used for genera and families.^[14][15][16]

In computational complexity theory, a sub-field of computer science, the formal names of algorithmic problems, e.g. MᴀxSAT, are sometimes set in small caps.^[17]

Linguists use small caps to analyze the morphology and tag (gloss) the parts of speech in a sentence; e.g.,

Linguists also use small caps to refer to the keywords in lexical sets for particular languages or dialects; e.g. the fleece and trap vowels in English.

The Bluebook prescribes small caps for some titles and names in United States legal citations.^[18] The practice precedes World War I, with Harvard Law Review using it while referring to itself. By 1915, small caps were used for all titles of journals and books.^[19]

In many books, mention of another part of the same book or mentions the work as a whole will be set in small caps. For example, articles in The World Book Encyclopedia refer to the encyclopedia as a whole and to the encyclopedia's other articles in small caps, as in the "Insurance" article's direction, at one point, to "See No-Fault Insurance", "No-Fault Insurance" being another of the encyclopedia's articles.

Among Romance languages, as an orthographic tradition, only the French and Spanish languages render Roman numerals in small caps to denote centuries, e.g. xviii^e siècle and siglo xviii for "18th century"; the numerals are cardinally postpositive in Spanish alone.^[20][21]

In a name with unusual capitalization like "LeBron", in a all caps context, some of the lowercase letters may be set in small caps to preserve the orthographic information ("LeBRON").^[22]

The first word or phrase of a chapter of a book or article may be in small caps, especially if following a drop cap.^{[citation needed]}

History

Research by Margaret M. Smith concluded that the use of small caps was probably popularised by Johann Froben in the early 16th century, who used them extensively from 1516.^[1] Froben may have been influenced by Aldus Manutius, who used very small capitals with printing Greek and at the start of lines of italic, copying a style common in manuscripts at the time, and sometimes used these capitals to set headings in his printing; as a result these headings were in all caps, but in capitals from a smaller font than the body text type.^[1] The idea caught on in France, where small capitals were used by Simon de Colines, Robert Estienne and Claude Garamond.^[1][23][24] Johannes Philippus de Lignamine used small caps in the 1470s, but apparently was not copied at the time.^[1][25][23]

Small capitals are not found in all font designs, as traditionally in printing they were primarily used within the body text of books and so are often not found in fonts that are not intended for this purpose, such as sans-serif types which historically were not preferred for book printing.^[26] Fonts in Use reports that Gert Wunderlich's Maxima (1970), for Typoart, was "maybe the first sans serif to feature small caps and optional oldstyle numerals across all weights."^[27] (Some caps-only typefaces intended for printing stationery, for instance Copperplate Gothic and Bank Gothic, were intended to be used with smaller sizes serving as small capitals, and had no lower case as a result.^[28][29])

Italic small capitals were historically rarer than roman small caps. Some digital font families, sometimes digitisations of older metal type designs, still only have small caps in roman style and do not have small caps in bold or italic styles.^[30][31] This is again because small caps were normally only used in body text and cutting bold and italic small caps was thought unnecessary. An isolated early appearance was in the Enschedé type foundry specimen of 1768, which featured a set cut by Joan Michaël Fleischman,^[32][33] and in 1837 Thomas Adams commented that in the United States "small capitals are in general only cast to roman fonts" but that "some founders in England cast italic small capitals to most, if not the whole of their fonts."^[34][c] (Bold type did not appear until the nineteenth century.) In 1956, Hugh Williamson's textbook Methods of Book Design noted that "one of the most conspicuous defects" of contemporary book faces was that they did not generally feature italic small capitals: "these would certainly be widely used if they were generally available".^[35] Exceptions available at the time were Linotype's Pilgrim, Janson and their release of Monotype Garamond, and from Monotype Romulus.^[35] More have appeared in the digital period, such as in Hoefler Text and FF Scala.^[30][36][37]

Computer support

Unicode

This section contains uncommon Unicode characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of the intended characters.

In orthography, small caps are allographs of capital letters. Unicode defines a number of small-capital (or, more accurately, petite-capital) characters for specialized use such as phonetic notation. They are deprecated as substitutes for small-cap formatting; rather, the basic character set should be used with suitable formatting controls as described in the preceding sections.^[d]

The Unicode petite-capital characters are found in the IPA extensions, Phonetic Extensions, Latin Extended-D and other blocks. These characters are intended for use in notation where they are semantically distinct – that is, for cases where they are not allographs. For example, petite capital ⟨ʀ⟩ represents a uvular trill in IPA, and ⟨ɢ⟩ a voiced uvular plosive; capital ⟨R⟩ and ⟨G⟩ have no defined meaning in IPA, but are commonly used as wildcards for 'resonant' and 'glide'. Thus using formatting to replicate ⟨ʀ⟩ would not be appropriate in phonetic notation, because if the formatting were lost, data would be lost and the text would change in meaning.

The petite-capital characters defined by Unicode for letters of the basic Latin alphabet are as follows. Shaded cells mark petite capitals that are not very distinct from minuscules in roman typeface, but they may be distinct in italic typeface, as is used in some phonetic notation.

Basic Latin small capitals

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z
baseline	ᴀ	ʙ	ᴄ	ᴅ	ᴇ	ꜰ	ɢ	ʜ	ɪ	ᴊ	ᴋ	ʟ	ᴍ	ɴ	ᴏ	ᴘ	ꞯ	ʀ	ꜱ	ᴛ	ᴜ	ᴠ	ᴡ	–	ʏ	ᴢ
superscript	*	𐞄		*	*	–	𐞒	𐞖	ᶦ	–	𞀹§	ᶫ	𞀻§	ᶰ		*	–	𐞪		𞁀§	ᶸ				𐞲
overscript**	–	◌ⷡ §		–	–	–	◌ᷛ	◌ⷩ §	–	–	◌ⷦ §	◌ᷞ	◌ᷟ	◌ᷡ		–	–	◌ᷢ		◌ⷮ §	–				–

* Superscript versions of petite-capital ᴀ, ᴅ, ᴇ and ᴘ are scheduled to be released with version 18 of the Unicode Standard in 2026.^[46][47]

** Although the overscript (combining superscript) characters are identified as 'small capitals' in Unicode, there are no corresponding capital overscript characters that they contrast with.

^§ Cyrillic 𞀹 𞀻 𞁀 and ◌ⷡ ◌ⷩ ◌ⷦ ◌ⷮ might be substituted for these letters.

Additionally, a few less-common Latin characters and several Greek characters also have petite capitals encoded:

Extended Latin small capitals^[e]

	Ꜳ	Æ	(Ƀ)	Ð	Ǝ	Ɠ	ᵷ (⅁)	Ħ	Ɨ	Ʞ	Ł	Ɬ	ŋ (И)	Œ	Ɔ	Ȣ	(Я)	ɹ (ꓤ)	–	–	ꝵ	Ʉ	Ɯ	Ʒ
baseline	–	ᴁ	ᴃ	ᴆ	ⱻ	ʛ	𝼂	–	ᵻ	𝼐	ᴌ	𝼄	ᴎ	ɶ	ᴐ	ᴕ	ᴙ	ᴚ	ʁ	ꭆ	ꝶ	ᵾ	ꟺ	ᴣ
superscript	𐞀					𐞔		ꟸ*	ᶧ			𐞜		𐞣					ʶ

* ꟸ is not technically a superscript Ħ, but it is rendered that way in many fonts.

Greek small capitals^[f]

	Γ	Δ	Θ	Λ	Ξ	Π	Ρ	Σ	Φ	Ψ	Ω
baseline	ᴦ	–	–	ᴧ	–	ᴨ	ᴩ	–	–	ᴪ	ꭥ

There is little call for small caps in Cyrillic, as there would be little graphic difference between small caps and lowercase. However, Unicode does provide for one small cap Cyrillic letter for use in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA), where small caps and lowercase are distinct in italic typeface:

Cyrillic small capitals (for use in Latin text)^[g]

	Л
baseline	ᴫ

Labels

The Unicode Consortium has a typographical convention of using small caps for its formal names for symbols, in running text. For example, the name of U+0416 Ж is conventionally shown as CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ZHE.^[48]

See also

• All caps – Text with all capital letters
• Alphabet 26 – Typeface designed by Bradbury Thompson
• CamelCase – Writing formatPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Mixed case – Using uppercase for a word's first letter, or using uppercase at allPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Small capital F

Notes

References

Further reading