Skip to main content
lower-case letter

lower-case letter

1 1.0
A small letter of the alphabet that is not a capital
  • noun
  • /ˈloʊərˌkeɪs ˈlɛtər/
translation icon : letra minúscula
  • After that, it's okay to use regular upper and lower case letters.
  • upper- and lower-case letters
  • lower-case letters and uppercase letters
  • upper and lower-case letters

So I went to the craft store and I just wanted to buy like pre made stencils and I literally couldn't find a single stencil pack that had lower case letters included.

Examples

  • LNF involves presenting children with a page of uppercase and lowercase letters and asking them to name as many letters as they can in 1 minute.

    Academic text (2015)
  • To make your password stronger, use upper and lower case letters, numbers, and the following symbols!

    Blog text (1)
  • For alphabet knowledge, the upper and lower case letters

    Academic text (2015)
  • For each, the child is shown a sheet with either all of the uppercase letters or all of the lowercase letters presented in random order.

    Academic text (2015)
  • By contrast, the word deaf, beginning with a lowercase letter, is used to describe the medical or physiological condition of hearing loss or deafness.

    Academic text (2014)
  • The LNF subtest measures a student's ability to rapidly name upper- and lowercase letters presented in a random sequence in 1 min.

    Academic text (2015)
  • The child was presented with three lowercase letters printed in 18-point Courier font and asked to mark the letter that represented the stimulus.

    Academic text (2006)
  • One word of caution: when typing URLs, the case structure—the use of upper and lower case letters—must be honored.

    Academic text (1995)
  • The LNF subtest of the DIBELS (Good & Kaminski, 2002) assesses fluency in naming upper- and lowercase letters in 1 min.

    Academic text (2013)
  • Please write your name using all lower-case letters for the form.

Synonyms

lowercase
vslower-case letter
9 1.9

The small letters of the alphabet, not capital letters

refers to one alphabet character written in the small form
small letter
vslower-case letter
1 1.9

A letter that is not a capital letter

is the general modern term for that small character form
minuscule
vslower-case letter
  • Specialized
7.4

A small letter used instead of a capital letter

is the everyday term used outside historical or typographic contexts

Antonyms

A large letter that you use at the start of a sentence or name

Surface Forms

Morphology

lower-case + letter

The meaning 'a letter in the smaller form' is directly derived from combining 'lower-case' (indicating the small/uncapitalized form) with 'letter' (a written symbol), so the overall sense is compositional. This contrast with 'capital/upper-case' is cross-linguistically common and would be predictable to a B1 learner who knows the constituent words.

Etymology

The term lower-case letter comes from old printing shops. Printers kept the small letters in a box called the lower case and the big letters in a box above, so lower-case letter came to mean the 'small form' of a letter.