Lowercased

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Written in small letters rather than capitals, as in the ordinary form of letters used within a sentence
2. Describing text that has been set in small letters instead of capital letters
3. Having been converted or written in the smaller form of the alphabet, not in capitals

Etymology: "Lowercased" is the past tense and past participle of "lowercase," so its history is really the history of the verb built on the printing term "lower case." That term comes from the way type was stored: compositors kept the small letters in the lower of two cases, or trays, of metal type, while the capitals sat in the upper case. The name describes a physical drawer, not the letters' shape or size. The verb grew out of the noun phrase "lower case," an adjective modifying a noun. When "lower case" was used before another noun, as in a "lower-case letter," it was often written as a single word or hyphenated, which made the phrase easier to parse as a unit. Once it could work as a verb, "to lowercase" meant changing letters to their small forms, and "lowercased" follows the usual pattern for regular verbs.

Synonyms: uncapitalized, decapitalized

Antonyms: capitalized, uppercased