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Is 'casing' a valid alternative to 'capitalization'?

English Language & Usage Asked by Clijsters on January 29, 2021

Searching for a noun which describes the letter-casing of words, I came across casing (without a prefix) and capitalization.
Searching several dictionaries and translation services, casing seems odd to me, as it refers to other meanings.

As casing is commonly used here on english SE to ask whether a word is capitalized or not, I’m still asking myself:

Is casing a valid alternative to capitalization?

Can I say something like:

  • Please fix the casing in your text

as alternative to

  • Please fix the capitalization in your text

Which one is commonly used?

Here are some examples, where I found ‘casing’ as a word referring to the capitalization of words:

EDIT:

Found this one on wiktionary:

casing

English

Noun

casing (plural casings)
[…]

  1. (uncountable, computing) The collective states of upper and lower case letters.
    The replacement string should have the same casing as the matched text.

4 Answers

'Case' refers to whether a verb is nominative, accusative, or genitive.

Case (verb)

And 'case' also refers to the upper or lower case of the first letter of a noum in a sentence.

Case (noun)

So just to say 'case in the text' would be ambiguous.

It would better to stay with the word 'capitalization'.

Answered by Nigel J on January 29, 2021

If someone grading a paper of mine commented, "Please fix the casing in your text," I would never guess that they meant capitalization. Instead, I would guess that they were referring to the "case" of nouns that Nigel pointed out.

If you are talking to the general public, I'd say that "casing" is NOT a valid alternative to "capitalization." However, if your audience possesses knowledge of very specific, language-related terminology, you might be able to get away with "casing."

If you are looking for an alternative way to say "Capitalization," I'd suggest "orthography," but this can refer to both spelling and punctuation.

Answered by securehope on January 29, 2021

Notice that your Wiktionary definition for casing says "computing". That means that casing is a technical term in the field of computing. If you use it outside of that field, then people may not understand you.

If you said to me as a software developer, "Fix your casing", I might understand you to mean, "Fix your source code so that it follows house style guidelines for casing convention." A casing convention is, for example, UpperCamelCasing or lowerCamelCasing for particular identifier types.

Answered by dangph on January 29, 2021

I think the Wiktionary quote gives an important hint: computing. It's perfectly valid to use casing in this sense in the context of programming for example, as you can see on Stack Overflow:

And on other computing sites on the SE network:

You'll also find it used in terms like camelCasing, and PascalCasing.

Looking at the profiles of the users who asked the questions you linked, you'll find that they all have Stack Overflow accounts with some rep. In other words, it would not be unreasonable to assume that they are programmers. It seems to me that casing does not see much usage outside of computing, except where it is used by programmers (but this might change in the future).

"Grammatical casing" is very rarely used (and is perhaps not entirely idiomatic) to mean "grammatical case" (example). The term "[letter] case" (which is equivalent to casing in meaning) sees usage outside computing (particularly in typography) but is easily confused with "[grammatical] case". For this reason, your example may be confusing to some people.

Answered by Laurel on January 29, 2021

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