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Why is it called upper and lower case?

When you spend hours proofreading and retyping essays, you get to wondering- why do we refer to large letters as upper case, and small as lower case? It’s actually a remnant of a past where printing presses had manually set letters. Small letters, which were used the majority of the time, were kept in the lower, easier to access case. Where as large letters were kept in the upper. Also interesting to note is that capitalization belongs to the script, not the language. So all languages using Latin script, like English, have upper and lower case, but languages using Devangari, such as Hindi or Sanskrit do not.


@AdaMcVean 

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