Definition

Noun: A lower-case letter is a small form of a letter (a, b, c, etc.) as distinguished from its capital or uppercase counterpart (A, B, C, etc.). These characters are typically used for the majority of text in writing, with uppercase letters used for specific purposes like starting sentences or proper nouns.

Usage

The term is used to refer to the smaller, non-capitalized form of an alphabetic character. It is often used in the context of typography, writing rules, and digital text formatting.

Examples

• Most of the words in this sentence are written with lower-case letters.
• The password must contain at least one lower-case letter and one number.
• In formal writing, you should not write an entire word in lower-case letters for emphasis; use italics instead.
• The font designer paid careful attention to the shape of each lower-case letter.

Advanced Usage

• "to lower-case" (verb, informal): The act of converting text from uppercase to lowercase.
  • Please lower-case the headings in that document.
• "lower-casing" (noun, informal): The process or result of making text lowercase.
  • The automatic lower-casing of the file names caused some errors.

Variants and Related Words

• Lowercase (adj, noun): The more common single-word form. It can describe the letters themselves or text set in them.
  • Adjective: Use a lowercase 'p' here.
  • Noun: The headline was set in all uppercase, but the body is in lowercase.
• Minuscule (noun, adj): A formal synonym, especially in palaeography and typography, referring to lowercase letters or a script using them.
• Small letter: A simple, non-technical synonym for a lower-case letter.

Synonyms

• Minuscule
• Small letter

Antonyms

• Upper-case letter (or uppercase letter, capital letter, majuscule)

Related Phrases and Concepts

• Case-sensitive: Describes a system (like a password field or a programming language) that distinguishes between upper- and lower-case letters.
  • The login is case-sensitive, so 'Password' is different from 'password'.
• Title case: A capitalization style where the first letter of each major word is uppercase.
• Sentence case: A style where only the first letter of the first word in a sentence is uppercase.

Noun

1. the characters that were once kept in bottom half of a compositor's type case