Alternating caps,
also known as studly caps or sticky caps (where "caps" is short for
capital letter
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
s), is a form of text notation in which the capitalization of letters varies by some pattern, or arbitrarily (often also omitting spaces between words and occasionally some letters), such as "aLtErNaTiNg cApS", "sTuDlY cApS" or "sTiCKycApS".
History
According to the
Jargon File
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET A ...
, the origin and significance of the practice is obscure. The term "alternating case" has been used as early as the 1970s, in several studies on
word identification.
Arbitrary variation found popularity among adolescent users during the
BBS
BBS may refer to:
Ammunition
* BBs, BB gun metal bullets
* BBs, airsoft gun plastic pellets
Computing and gaming
* Bulletin board system, a computer server users dial into via dial-up or telnet; precursor to the Internet
* BIOS Boot Specificat ...
and early
WWW
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
eras of online culture, as if in parody of the marginally less idiosyncratic
capitalization
Capitalization (American English) or capitalisation (British English) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term a ...
found in common
trade and service marks of the time. This method was extensively used since the 1980s in the BBS-world and
warez
Warez is a common computing and broader cultural term referring to pirated software (i.e. illegally copied, often after deactivation of anti-piracy measures) that is distributed via the Internet. Warez is used most commonly as a noun, a plural ...
scene (for example in
FILE_ID.DIZ
FILE_ID.DIZ is a plain-text file containing a brief description of the content of archive formats, archive to which it belongs.
Such files were originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems (BBSes) and is still used in the ...
and
.nfo files) to show "elite" (or elitist) attitude, the often used variant was using small-caps vowels and capitalised consonants ("THiS iS aN eXCePTioNaLLy eLiTe SeNTeNCe.") or reversed capitals ("eXTENDED kEY gENERERATOR pRO").
The iNiQUiTY BBS software based on
Renegade
Renegade or The Renegade may refer to:
Aircraft
*Lake Renegade, an American amphibious aircraft design
*Murphy Renegade, a Canadian ultralight biplane design
*Southern Aeronautical Renegade, an American racing aircraft design
Games
*'' Comman ...
had a feature to support two variants of this automatically: either all vowels would be uppercase or all vowels would be lowercase, with the consonants as the other case.
Messages may be hidden in the capital and lower-case letters such as "
ShoEboX" which spells "SEX" in capitals and "hobo" in lower-case. The webmail service
Hotmail
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
was originally stylized as HoTMaiL, which spells
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
in upper-case.
A
meme
A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural i ...
known as "Mocking
SpongeBob
''SpongeBob SquarePants'' (or simply ''SpongeBob'') is an American Animated series, animated Television comedy, comedy Television show, television series created by marine science educator and animator Stephen Hillenburg for Nickelodeon. It ...
" popularized using alternating caps to convey a mocking tone starting in May 2017,
leading to alternating caps becoming a mainstream method of conveying mockery in text.
Usage and effect
Alternating caps are typically used to display mockery in text messages.
The randomized capitalization leads to the flow of words being broken, making it harder for the text to be read as it disrupts
word identification even when the size of the letters is the same as in
uppercase
Letter case is the distinction between the Letter (alphabet), letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain lang ...
or
lowercase
Letter case is the distinction between the Letter (alphabet), letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain lang ...
.
Unlike the use of all-lowercase letters, which suggests efficiency as a motivation, alternating caps requires additional effort to type, either by holding and releasing the shift key with one hand while
hunting-and-pecking, or by intermittently pressing one shift key or the other while
touch typing
Touch typing (also called blind typing, or touch keyboarding) is a style of typing. Although the phrase refers to typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys—specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard thro ...
.
See also
*
Camel case
Camel case (sometimes stylized as camelCase or CamelCase, also known as camel caps or more formally as medial capitals) is the practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation. The format indicates the separation of words with a single ...
*
All caps
In typography, all caps (short for "all capitals") refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters, for example: "THIS TEXT IS IN ALL CAPS". All caps may be used for emphasis (for a word or phrase). They are commonly seen in ...
Notes
References
Capitalization
Internet culture
Orthography
{{Typography terms