Camel case

I'd heard of 'upper case' and 'lower case', obviously, but not of 'camel case' until our web editor enlightened me recently.

It's one of a number of names for the practice of using capital letters in the middle of (usually compound) words – 'iPod', for example. The capital letter is said to resemble the hump of a camel.

As you can imagine, camel case is popular in brand names and unpopular in subbing circles. In fact, you could say that having to remember or constantly check strange capitalisations gives subs the hump!

The Wikipedia article on camel case (or more appropriately, CamelCase) is rather good, so I'll just point you over there today.

A camel, courtesy of MorguefileWhat are you looking at?

2 comments:

Laura Payne said...

Fascinating. I had never heard of CamelCase either. Thanks for the info.

mighty red pen said...

I've never heard this called CamelCase, that does make me chuckle. I've more commonly heard these words called "midcaps," which is how CMS refers to them.