Decapitalizes

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To transform all uppercase letters in a word or text to lowercase; to remove capital letters used at the beginning of words or sentences; to convert capitalized forms into non-capitalized ones
2. To change letters that are in uppercase within a text to their lowercase equivalents; to strip initial capital letters from proper names or titles; to alter capitalization by making all letters small
3. To convert capital letters at the start or within words into lowercase characters; to reduce all uppercase letter forms in a passage to lowercase; to modify text by removing the use of capital letters in favor of lowercase ones

Etymology: "Decapitalizes" is the third-person singular form of "decapitalize", so it is simply the verb with the "-s" ending. The verb itself is built from "de-", a prefix meaning "reverse or remove", plus "capitalize", which comes from "capital" (a letter of the largest size, from Latin "capitalis", "of the head", from "caput", "head") and the suffix "-ize". The sense is therefore to take away capital letters, reversing what capitalizing does. The base "capitalize" is the older and more familiar verb, and "decapitalize" follows the same pattern as other English verbs that undo an action with "de-". Its use is largely confined to computing, editing and style-guide contexts, where converting text to lowercase is a routine task.

Synonyms: lowercases, uncapitalizes, downcases, minimizes

Antonyms: capitalizes, uppercases, majuscule, titlecases