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In orthography and typography, letter case (or just case) is the distinction between the letters that are in larger upper case (also ''capital letters'', ''capitals'', ''caps'', ''large letters'', or more formally ''majuscule'' (see ''Terminology'') and smaller lower case (also ''small letters'', or more formally ''minuscule'', see ''Terminology'') in the written representation of certain languages. Here is a comparison of the upper and lower case versions of each letter included in the English alphabet (the exact representation will vary according to the font used): Typographically, the basic difference between the majuscules and minuscules is not that the majuscules are big and minuscules small, but that the majuscules generally have the same height. The height of the minuscules varies, as some of them have parts higher or lower than the average, i.e. ascenders and descenders. In Times New Roman, for instance, ''b, d, f, h, k, l, t ''〔In Roman Antiqua or other vertical fonts, the defunct Initial or Medial Long-s ‘ ſ ’ would have been an ascender, however, in italics, it could have been one of only two letters in the English or Expanded Latin Alphabet with both an ascender and a descender; the other being ‘ f ’ when italicized. 〕 are the letters with ascenders, and ''g, j, p, q, y'' are the ones with descenders. Further to this, with old-style numerals still used by some traditional or classical fonts—although most do have a set of alternative Lining Figures— ''6'' and ''8'' make up the ascender set, and ''3, 4, 5, 7'' and ''9'' the descender set. Letter case is often prescribed by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular discipline. In orthography, the uppercase is primarily reserved for special purposes, such as the first letter of a sentence or of a proper noun, which makes the lowercase the more common variant in text. In mathematics, letter case may indicate the relationship between objects with uppercase letters often representing "superior" objects (e.g. ''X'' could be a set containing the generic member ''x''). Engineering design drawings are typically labelled entirely in upper-case letters, which are easier to distinguish than lowercase, especially when space restrictions require that the lettering be small. == Terminology == The terms ''upper case'' and ''lower case'' can be written as two consecutive words, connected with a hyphen (''upper-case'' and ''lower-case''), or as a single word (''uppercase'' and ''lowercase''). These terms originated from the common layouts of the shallow drawers called ''type cases'' used to hold the movable type for letterpress printing. Traditionally, the capital letters were stored in a separate case that was located above the case that held the small letters, and the name proved easy to remember since capital letters are taller. ''Majuscule'', ( or ), for palaeographers, is technically any script in which the letters have very few or very short ascenders and descenders, or none at all (for example, the majuscule scripts used in the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, or the Book of Kells). By virtue of their visual impact, this made the term majuscule an apt descriptor for what much later came to be more commonly referred to as uppercase letters. ''Minuscule'' refers to lowercase letters. The word is often spelled ''miniscule'', by association with the unrelated word ''miniature'' and the prefix ''mini-''. This has traditionally been regarded as a spelling mistake (since ''minuscule'' is derived from the word ''minus''〔), but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a nonstandard or variant spelling.〔 ''Miniscule'' is still less likely, however, to be used in reference to lower-case letters. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Letter case」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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