All caps

In typography, all caps (short for all capitals) refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters.

All caps is usually used for emphasis. It commonly appears in titles on book covers, on advertising billboards, and in dramatic newspaper headlines. Short strings of word in all caps appear bolder and louder than mixed case. However, the shapes of words set in lowercase provide a valuable cue to readers that helps speed the process of reading, and when type is set in all caps, every word fits into a rectangle. As a result, all caps are not widely used in body copy because they are difficult to read in extended passages. The major exception to this is so-called small print in advertisements and legal documents, where the typesetter lacks incentive to make the text accessible.

Before the development of lower case letters in the 8th century, texts in the Latin alphabet were written in a single case, the one now identified with capital letters.

ALLCAPS or CAPS_WITH_UNDERSCORES is an identifier naming convention in many programming languages that symbolizes that the given identifier represents a constant.

Use on the internet

This form of typography also appears in on-line forums. It was once an inevitable byproduct of using machines with limited support for lowercase text (such as certain "dumb" terminals, early Apple II models), but as full support of ASCII became standard, it became solely identified with "shouting" or attention-seeking behaviour.

Because capital letters are supposed to be used for shouting, posting a forum message entirely in caps is a sign that the poster is a newbie or a troll. Since the beginning of America Online, ALL CAPS has commonly been associated with AOL users. More experienced users will sometimes jocularly use all-caps and misspelled phrases to make fun of newbies or use the saying "caps lock is cruise control for cool."

Use in other languages

In Japanese, Latin alphabet all caps is used as foreign branding or by performers as stage names. Examples of this latter use include model MEGUMI, singer SAYAKA and professional wrestler KENTA.

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Use on the internet

Use in other languages

See also