Uppercasing

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. The process of converting all letters in a text to their corresponding capital letters; the act of emphasizing words by making every character uppercase; a typographic method used to signal importance or distinguish text segments
2. Changing the letters within a string from lowercase to capital form; applying uniform capitalization for stylistic or formatting purposes; transforming text to enhance readability or denote prominence
3. Rendering all alphabetic characters in a sequence as capitals; the action of shifting text entirely into uppercase for clarity or emphasis; a formatting technique that alters letter case to uppercase characters exclusively

Etymology: Printers did not coin "uppercase" as a metaphor; the name is literal. In the days of hand-set metal type, compositors kept each letter in a divided wooden tray called a case. The capital letters sat in the upper compartments and the small letters in the lower ones, which is why the two kinds of letter became known as "upper case" and "lower case." The term describes where the type physically lay in the compositor's hand. The word was built from two plain English parts. "Upper" comes from Old English "upp," and "case" traces back through Middle English and Old French to Latin "capsa," meaning a box or container, which is itself related to "capere," to take or hold. So the word that now names a typographic shift is, at root, a description of a box. Someone pressing the Shift key on a keyboard is, in effect, reaching for the top drawer of a printer's case.

Synonyms: capitalizing, capitalisation, capitalization

Antonyms: lowercasing, decapitalizing