Case (orthography)

The distinction between majuscule (capital) and minuscule (lowercase) letters is known as case.

Only a few alphabetic writing systems have case, including the modern Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, and Armenian alphabets. Most other writing systems, such as the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, do not.

In alphabets with case, usually each majuscule letter has a corresponding minuscule letter. These correspondences are very significant. Typically, both letters in a majuscule-minuscule pair will have the same name, same pronunciation, and will be treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.

Usually, a language has capitalisation rules as to whether majuscules or minuscules are to be used in a given context. However, these rules may frequently be ignored.

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The distinction between hiragana and katakana is similar to, but not the same as, case.