small capital
- noun
- /smɔl ˈkæpɪtl/
- Specialized
:
minúsculas
- In the title, the author's name was printed in small capital letters for emphasis.
Examples
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The designer chose to use small capital letters to give the text a sophisticated look.
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For the heading of the document, he decided to use small capital letters instead of regular capitals.
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Although they started from a small capital base, the Islamic banks, thanks to the influx of petro-dollars from the Gulf States following the oil price shocks of 1973-74 and again in 1978, have grown at a much faster rate than the other traditional banks.
Academic text (1990)
Synonyms
1
6.9
A capital letter the same height as a small letter used for style
Antonyms
How Uppercase
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'capital' = uppercase letter and 'small' qualifies it as a reduced-size capital (a capital letter made small to match lowercase height), so a learner who knows both words can infer the term. This descriptive, cross-linguistically common construction in typography follows normal adjective + noun composition and is therefore transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Small capital is a printing term that comes from a simple image: a normal capital letter made small so it is the same height as lowercase letters. Because it looks like a little uppercase letter, printers use small capitals to give words clear 'emphasis' or a classic look.