Sentence case
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Sentence case in a general sense describes the way that capitalisation is used within a sentence. Sentence case also describes the standard capitalisation of an English sentence, i.e. the first letter of the sentence is capitalised, with the rest being lower case (unless requiring capitalisation for a specific reason, e.g. proper nouns, acronyms, etc.).
There are various other forms of sentence case (in the first sense), often developed for specific situations e.g. computer programming or markup languages where certain characters are not allowed.
Here are some alternative sentence cases used in written English:
- Sentence case - first letter of the sentence capitalised, all others lower case (with the exceptions noted above)
- UPPER CASE - all letters are capitalised
- lower case - no letters are capitalised
- Title Case - the first letter of each word is capitalised, the rest are lower case. In some cases short articles, prepositions, and conjunctions are not capitalised.
Here is a selection of sentence cases not used in standard English, but common in computer programming and other specialised fields:
- CamelCase - First letter of each word capitalised, spaces and punctuation removed.
- embedded_underscore - punctuation is removed and spaces are replaced by single underscores. Normally the letters share the same case (either UPPER_CASE_EMBEDDED_UNDERSCORE or lower_case_embedded_underscore) but the case can be mixed.
- sTuDlYcApS - Mixed case, with no semantic or syntactic significance to the use of the capitals. Sometimes only vowels are upper case, other times upper and lower case is alternated, but often it is just random. The name comes from the fact that it was used to imply coolness on the part of the writer, although nowadays it is more often used ironically. (It is also used to mock the violation of standard English case conventions by marketing people in the naming of computer software packages, even when there is no technical requirement to do so, e.g. Sun's naming of a windowing system NeWS.)