What do YouTube, eBay, and Leonardo DiCaprio have in common? All three represent a typographical phenomenon sometimes known as “medial capitals”—or, more poetically, as CamelCase. All of them, that is, are written with some capital letters mixed into lower case letters, without spacing, in order to make them easier to read and pronounce.
It’s a logical approach that will be familiar to chemists, who have been using mixed case letters for clarity in chemical formulae since the Swedish chemist Berzelius first suggested it in 1813. Iron oxide is, for example, written “FeO,” combining the symbols for iron, Fe, and oxygen, O, without a space between them, to indicate their combination.
Chemicals may have helped start it, but CamelCase really came into its own with the birth of computer programming via typed programming languages in the 1970s. For many elements of early programming languages—such as the names of files and variables—spaces were not permitted as characters, meaning words and terms had to be run together while typing.
Coders compelled to type line after line of highly complicated text found that using capital letters within these strings of letters was an extremely useful way of keeping track of commands. Typing “PrintScreen” is, for example, easier to read at a glance than typing “printscreen”—especially if you’re looking over hundreds of lines of code written by someone else.
There are, technically, two different types of CamelCase: UpperCamelCase (UCC), in which the first letter of each word is capitalized, and lowerCamelCase (lCC), in which the first letter is lower case. All of which would perhaps be of little interest to anyone other than the most dedicated of linguistic researchers, were it not for the coming of the world wide web.
Spaces are not acceptable as part of a web address—and, as the web grew through the 1990s and 2000s, this simple fact suddenly put everyone in the position programmers had occupied. If you wanted to be able to distinguish between the different elements of often-complex website names and addresses, it made sense to use CamelCase; something that was doubly true if you were a company wanting your name and web address to be both identical and as legible as possible.
It’s important to note that the web didn’t invent CamelCase as a style of corporate branding. Perhaps the first companies to deploy it were the rival film format brands CinemaScope and VistaVision in the 1950s. It is, however, fair to point to the web as a massive popularizer of the technique—something that has also seen it become fashionable as well as functional, perhaps because of the association with leading technology brands from eBay to YouTube via iPods and PayPal.
The charming term CamelCase itself, though, does seem to be a child of the digital age. Its likely origin is a 1995 Usenet posting by one Newton Love, who offered this as his pet term for the typing convention thanks to “the humpiness of the style.” As so often online, the whimsically appealing won out over the merely traditional or authoritative, and the term seems set to remain a permanent part of typography.66