Small caps

This article is about typography. For "small cap" in the context of the stock market, see Market capitalization.

In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are uppercase (capital) characters that are printed in a smaller size than normal uppercase characters of the same font. Typically, the height of a small capital will be one ex, the same height as most lowercase characters in the font. Well-designed small capitals are not simply scaled-down versions of normal capitals; they normally have retain same stroke weight as other letters, and a wider aspect ratio to facilitate readability.

Many word processors and text formatting systems include an option to format text in caps and small caps; this 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 associated with a font, making text such as "Latvia joined NATO on March 29, 2004" look proportional, but most modern digital fonts do not have a small-caps case, so the typesetting system simply reduces the uppercase letters by a fraction, making them look out of proportion.

Uses of small caps

Small caps are often used for text that is all uppercase; this makes the run of capital letters seem less "jarring" to the reader. For example, the style of many publications, including the Atlantic Monthly and USA Today, is to use small caps for initialisms of three or more letters; thus: "U.S." and "FDR" in normal caps, but "nato" in small caps. The initialisms "A.D." and "B.C." are often smallcapped as well.

Small caps are commonly used for showing keyboard shortcuts: for example, "The keyboard shortcut in Microsoft Word for small caps is Control + Shift + K."

Perhaps the most common use of small capitals is in the common rendering of the word "Lord" in many versions of the Bible.

French and some British publications use small caps to indicate the surname by which someone with a long formal name is to be designated in the rest of a written work. An elementary example is Don Quixote de La Mancha. Similarly, they are used for those languages in which the surname comes first, such as the romanization Mao Zedong.

Some publishers' house styles, such as those of Newsweek and DC Comics, use small caps to refer to the name of their own publications inside the same or another publication.

The text of a formal monumental inscription or the legend on a coin are often rendered in small caps: "Sir Christopher Wren's tomb in St Paul's Cathedral reads, in Latin, simply si monumentum requiris circumspice" (approximately meaning "If you are looking for his monument, look around" — referring to the cathedral itself, which he designed).

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, the Anthropomorphic personification Death always speaks in small caps.

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Uses of small caps

See also