camel case
/ˈkæm(ə)l ˌkeɪs/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.63 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Especially in computer programming, and in the names of brands and organizations: a style of typography in which several words are concatenated together without any spaces between them, with the first letter of each word (sometimes excluding the first word) capitalized.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Near-synonyms: intercapping, intercaps"
- "In the SMIL 1.0 specification, test criteria were hyphenated (e.g., system-bitrate and system-screen-size). This was deprecated by the SMIL 2.0 specification in favor of camel case attributes to be consistent with other developing standards."
- "It's common practice to name private members in camelCase, that is with an initial lower case letter and a capital for the start of each word."
- "Write element and attribute names in a style called "CamelCase." Elements reflecting an entity should be written in UpperCamelCase; elements and attributes reflecting a property should be written in lowerCamelCase."
- "Type and attribute names, and occasionally variable names, are traditionally written using camel case (with the first word lowercased and subsequent words title-cased, like dateTime), although there are exceptions to this rule (such as anyURI and QName), and some people prefer hyphenated lowercase words (like local-name)."
- "RadioShack is an example of a company name that uses camel case. In some cases, technology uses camel case, such as VistaVision, which is a widescreen format for movies. It's little wonder that camel case appears in application code—everyone already knows how to use it. […] Microsoft and other industry leaders have modified the standard use of camel case. When you talk about camel casing for .NET, what you really mean is that the first letter of each word, except the first word, is capitalized. For example, if you want to create a variable that contains the background color for an object, you might call it backColor."
Etymology
From camel + case (“nature of a piece of alphabetic type”), probably modelled after lowercase and uppercase, from a fancied resemblance of the capital letters to the humps of a two-humped camel.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈkæm(ə)l ˌkeɪs/
- British English: /ˈkæml̩ keɪs/