Downcasing

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The process of converting text to lowercase letters, making all characters uniform in size to avoid case sensitivity issues
2. A method used in computer programming and text processing to change capital letters to lowercase for consistency and simplification
3. The action of transforming a string of text so that every letter is rendered in lowercase, often to ensure compatibility in data handling

Etymology: "Downcasing" is the -ing form of "downcase," a verb formed by combining "down" with "case," in the sense of the letter-case of printed type. The compound draws on the printing trade, where "case" originally referred to the wooden trays that held sorts of type, and the capital letters sat in the upper case while the small letters sat in the lower case. Moving a letter from one tray to the other is the physical act that "downcase" describes, with "down" pointing toward the lower case. The verb's natural home is computing, where software compares and stores text without regard to whether letters are capitalized. Converting everything to lowercase lets "Apple," "APPLE" and "apple" match one another, which is why the term appears so often in programming languages and search tools.

Synonyms: lowercasing, simplifying, democratizing, standardizing, INVALID