Upper case and lower case

In a printing workshop, every letter was a small block of metal. The person who arranged them into words, the compositor, worked at a sloping stand holding two shallow wooden trays called cases, each divided into little compartments.

The higher case, further from the hand, held the capital letters, plus figures and accented letters. Capitals are used less often, so they could sit a little out of the way. The lower case, close at hand, held the small letters, punctuation and the blank spaces that go between words, the pieces needed all the time.

So capitals became upper-case letters and small letters became lower-case letters. The furniture is long gone from most of our lives, but the words are on every keyboard and phone. When a password is “case-sensitive”, it is using a term from a printer’s workshop.

The compartments in the lower case were not all the same size. Common letters like e had big boxes; rare ones like z had small ones.

Look closer: Printers left us plenty of other words too, including two that now mean “said too often”.