Who Invented Uppercase and Lowercase?
Ever wondered why we have uppercase and lowercase letters? In this article, you can find out more about:
- Who invented uppercase and lowercase;
- The story of capital and small letters;
- The origin of uppercase and lowercase; and
- How language evolved over time.
Are you ready? ✨
🙋 Need a hand with capitalization? Check out our lowercase to uppercase converter and, going the other way, our uppercase to lowercase converter.
The question of who invented uppercase and lowercase letters isn't straightforward — the development reaches back to the origins of writing, medieval scribing practices, and later innovations in printing.
The origins of writing and early alphabets in Latin and Greek primarily used only capital letters. Small letters (lowercase) were invented as a more efficient scribing method in medieval Europe, around the 8th and 9th centuries.
Carolingian minuscule was a clear and uniform script developed during Charlemagne's educational reforms in the late 8th and early 9th centuries. Promoted by Alcuin of York, who led the monastic school at Tours, it spread through monasteries as the standard script for copying books. Centuries later, Renaissance scholars rediscovered it and used it as the model for the Roman upper- and lowercase letters we still use today.
You could say that the ones who invented uppercase and lowercase, at least in the terms as we know them today, were printers in the 15th century. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg came with the challenge of organizing many tiny metal letters for a much larger printing machine. The system printers used at the time stored capital letters in the upper-case drawers and small letters in the lower-case drawers.
Of course, letter case comes with a bigger purpose than practicality in storage. The use of capital letters also helped with emphasis of titles, pointing out names, and marking the beginning of sentences. Even today, we use letter case for better readability and structure in writing.
Uppercase letters have a longer history than small letters, as stone inscriptions in Roman times were only expressed in capital letters. Lowercase letters only arose later, around the Middle Ages, when scribes developed quicker handwriting methods.
The origin of uppercase and lowercase terms reach back to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, where printers used to store big letters in the upper case and small ones in the lower case drawer,.
The invention of the letter case cannot be attributed to a single person. The custom of using both uppercase and lowercase letters developed gradually over centuries. From early Roman times, where only capital letters were carved in stone, to lowercase writing used by medieval scribes for more efficiency. The formalization of the term occurred with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, storing large and small letter blocks in upper and lower “cases,” which is where the term letter case comes from.
This article was written by Julia Kopczyńska and reviewed by Steven Wooding.