A Tallahassee caller wonders about the name for terms that are capitalized in the middle, like MasterCard and FedEx. Grant explains that they’re commonly called CamelCase, not to be confused with Studly Caps. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “CamelCase”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Mark Miller listening on WFSU in Tallahassee.
Oh, hiya, Mark.
Hello, Mark.
Welcome to the show.
Well, thank you very much.
What may we do for you?
Growing up, you know, we learned the rule that, you know, you capitalized words, you know, in the beginning.
And what I’ve noticed over time that there seems like to be a proliferation of more words are showing up with capital letters in the middle of them.
Like proper names, sometimes women in particular use like Roxanne or Anne-Marie and capitalize the M, but it’s one word.
Also, there’s a lot of companies now that are using that capitalized letters in the middle of their names.
And I’ve always wondered what the term is for that, if there is a term.
Yeah, the older, more formal name for this is medial capitals, but that’s kind of boring, right?
Medial, M-E-D-I-A-L, capitals.
And it’s exactly what you say.
It’s a word that has in it somewhere a capital letter that’s not at the beginning.
And the whole word itself isn’t all caps, so it’s a mix of lowercase and uppercase.
There’s some other names, too.
Some people call it camel case.
Have you heard that one?
Yeah.
In fact, I took a software course, and one of the things, they called it camelbacker, if you’re a camelbacker.
Yeah, yeah.
As opposed to being an underscore when you separated your file names.
Oh, really?
Exactly right.
It comes from, tends to, the phrase itself, camel case, comes from computer programming.
Because some computer languages traditionally have not allowed spaces in the code in certain places.
And so in order to indicate that you’ve got two words, you just run them together and capitalize one rather than putting a space between them.
Right.
It’s called camel because when you look at the word, there’s a hump in the middle, just like a camel.
Some people call it studly caps, but that’s a little confusing because studly caps is also that kind of wildly inconsistent capitalization that you see when people are goofing off online and kind of imitating people who don’t know how to type properly where like every third letter is capitalized.
Sort of like a ransom note.
Yeah, kind of a ransom note typing.
It’s really irregular.
A camel case tends to be just like one letter in the middle is capitalized and not multiple letters.
And it tends to be that capital letter indicates the start of a new word.
That’s why it’s capitalized.
Where studly caps is just you’re just, it’s willy-nilly, whatever word.
FedEx does it and ExxonMobil.
Well, yeah, brand names were the innovators here.
A lot of brand names were doing this as early as the 1950s, maybe even earlier than that.
And it’s slowly grown over the years.
And certainly with the rise of the computer and certainly the personal computer.
And where computer programming became a thing that you could do in your home as a pastime rather than something you would do for hire for a company.
A lot more people became conditioned and comfortable with that kind of capitalization.
So it’s in the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s, and here we are in the 2010s, where we’re finding a lot of people just do this as just a matter of course.
Even on Twitter and Facebook, in order to cram words in there and to make it comprehensible, people will just take out the spaces and capitalize the letters instead.
Mark, thank you so much for calling with this interesting question.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Call us with your Camelbacks, 1-877-929-9673, or send your Camel cases to words@waywordradio.org.
