With so many tech words being multiple words joined together with letters in the middle capitalized (like PowerPoint), there's the potential for a new phenomenon. You can change which letter is capitalized and get a different meaning. For instance, in some databases there's a function called CommonKey. If you change the capitalization to ComMonkey, it looks like it means something very different. What would something like that be called?
Or for that matter, is there a term for words that are capitalized in the way that PowerPoint is?
First, for the mixed-case terminology question. The technical term is "medial capitals," with a common term of "camelCase," alluding to the humps on the backs of camels.
As for the name of the phenomenon you describe, it seems to me that it is a kind of amphibology. Since I don't have a term to describe this exact kind of ambiguity, if I were writing a technical study of it, I might call it a CamelCase Amphibology. It may not roll off the tongue, but then, most things that do are rather disgusting.
One of my editors call those "embedded caps," but at this blog:
https://wordsbybob.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/camelcase-camel-case-just-in-case/#more-2470
where Bob McDonnell (his surname itself an example) observes the following additional names:
There are many other names for camelcase. These include Pascal case, bumpy caps, embedded caps, intercaps, medial capitals, mixed caps and bi-capitalization. Strangely, none of the synonyms are camelcase themselves.
Is it too recent to even have an "official" name? When did this first start showing up? Was "eBay" the first? I wonder if it might, in part, be related to the fact that, in early computer operating systems, spaces between characters were not allowed?
Heimhenge said:
Is it too recent to even have an "official" name? When did this first start showing up? Was "eBay" the first? I wonder if it might, in part, be related to the fact that, in early computer operating systems, spaces between characters were not allowed?
I don't think it's too recent to have an official name — as Glenn said, the "official" name for the convention is "medial capitals." Also in accord with Glenn, the most common name I've heard for it is "CamelCase."
Additionally, I doubt that "eBay" was the first to use it (the blog post you quoted suggested "Pascal case" as an option, and the Pascal language predates eBay by many years). But that means I also agree with your supposition that "CamelCase" originated in programming language, where spaces between words were not proper syntax.
Yeah, I remember Pascal. I used mostly Fortran, and then later Basic, but I saw enough Pascal to know what you're saying. Predates eBay by decades.
This thread brings to mind another issue I've had with embedded caps (or medial capitals). With words like "eBay," "iPhone," "iConji," and others that force a lowercase letter at the start, what happens when that word starts a sentence? I've always tried to avoid that issue by rewriting the sentence so the word was elsewhere, even though that sometimes gets a little awkward. But what if grammar considerations absolutely require it at the start of the sentence? Do you change that first lowercase letter to a cap?
Again, the phenomenon is so recent I'm not sure there is a "rule" about what to do in that case.