Upper case and lower case

Day 204 / 365

I must have written dozens of blogs so far about the origins and meanings of certain words. I just can’t help it, it’s the most fun thing for me to find out. So I got another one for you today. In typing, we call the smaller letters “abcd…” as lowercase, and the bigger ones “ABCD..” as upper case. Ever wondered why that is?

To find the answer to that, we need to go back to the time of the early printing press.

The very first printing presses had blocks of letters that were arranged to form words and sentences. Ink would then be applied to these letters, and when a piece of paper was “pressed” against them, it would leave an imprint.

The box where these blocks of letters were stored were called type cases. They looked something like this

The larger letter blocks were stored in the top drawer, or the “upper” case and the smaller ones were stored in the bottom or the “lower” case. Hence we call capital letters uppercase letters!

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Perfection vs. Continuous Improvement