Lower-case Letter (Noun)
Meaning
The characters that were once kept in bottom half of a compositor's type case.
Classification
Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents.
Examples
- In the early days of printing, the compositor would set upper-case letters on the top half of the case, and lower-case letters on the bottom.
- A compositor's task was to sort the type pieces, placing lower-case letters in the bottom half of the case and capital letters in the top.
- In the busy printing office, lower-case letters got often mixed with uppercase, but the compositors knew how to handle them efficiently.
- Typography back then was indeed complicated, with upper and lower-case letters kept separately.
- In traditional typesetting the location of the individual type pieces – lower-case letters at the bottom, capital at the top – largely controlled the efficiency of the compositors' workflow.