majuscule

[prettygoodword]

majuscule (muh-JUHS-kyool, MAJ-uh-skyool) - adj., (of letters) capital.


THESE ARE MAJUSCULE LETTERS and these are miniscule. The formal name for uppercase. Interesting that miniscule gained wider currency via extension meaning small, while majuscule didn't, outside of typography -- no idea what the story is behind that. Originally, it referred to scripts with few and small ascenders and descenders. Adopted in 1722 from French, from Latin māiusculus, somewhat larger, diminutive of māior (major), greater.

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

I wonder whether it's partly that people used minuscule letters quite a lot more where the Latin terms held, both before and after printing began but continuing more recently. Minuscule is also for the little handwritten ones, but majuscule is block caps in manuscripts (not really counting the one sometimes decorated letter that often began a new paragraph or section), whereas various kinds of display scripts are also used in MS as the equiv of a headline. Majuscule includes pre-MS epigraphy usage in the stone-carving sense--rustic caps and square caps--from long before printers split their bits of poured lead between the upper and lower half of a case. Minuscule was once an innovation. :)

And since early European printing conventions spent 100-150 years mimicking manuscript conventions painstakingly, I think there's an influence. When palaeographers began trying to identify and classify, they began with the words that earlier workers had used.

[prettygoodword]

Very strong influence, yes, and really it was a palaeographic term before it was typographic. The Latin-area influence is an interesting idea.

Italic was also once an innovation.

[thistleingrey]

*nods* Italic: another borrowing from manuscript styles. :) I think some scholars have begun looking more carefully at early modern crossings, but there's still an odd MS-first or print-first investigative bias. I'm guilty of it, too, but then, not an early-modernist.