Capitalizing

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The act of writing a letter or word with the initial character in uppercase ; the process of obtaining or providing financial assets for a business or venture
2. Converting the first character of letters into uppercase for proper nouns or emphasis ; supplying the necessary capital or funds to support a project or company
3. Changing a lowercase letter to uppercase at the start of words according to language rules ; arranging or securing money and resources to finance an enterprise or investment

Etymology: The verb "capitalizing" is built from "capitalize," which comes from "capital," and "capital" comes ultimately from Latin "caput," meaning "head." The link to money is the surprising part: the sense of a sum of money or stock looks like a mere extension, but it developed from the Latin "capitalis," "of the head," which in medieval Latin came to mean principal sums or livestock counted by head. In English, the financial sense of "capital" was recorded in the 1600s, and "to capitalize" in the sense of supplying funds came later, in the 1800s. The typographic sense, writing a word with an initial capital letter, has a separate and more direct route. Capital letters are so named because they are the "head" letters of a set, and the verb "to capitalize" in that sense was recorded in English in the 1800s, reflecting the printing and writing conventions of the time. The two senses of "capitalize" thus share a Latin root but arrived in English along different paths, one through commerce and one through the printing trade.

Synonyms: exploiting, taking advantage, profiting, monetizing, leveraging

Antonyms: losing, squandering, wasting