Small Caps Letters

The small caps letters on this page are not a font setting but twenty-five real Unicode characters, each a capital letter drawn at the height of a lowercase one: ᴀ ʙ ᴄ ᴅ ᴇ ꜰ ɢ ʜ ɪ ᴊ ᴋ ʟ ᴍ ɴ ᴏ ᴘ ꞯ ʀ ꜱ ᴛ ᴜ ᴠ ᴡ ʏ ᴢ. Because they are characters, they go anywhere plain text goes: an Instagram or TikTok bio, a Discord or game nickname, an X post, a WhatsApp status, a spreadsheet cell, a file name. A "small caps text generator" does nothing more than swap each letter you type for its twin from this list, so you can do the same by hand here: ʜᴇʟʟᴏ, ᴡᴇʟᴄᴏᴍᴇ, ᴛʜᴀɴᴋ ʏᴏᴜ.

None of these letters was made for decoration. ɪ ʏ ʀ ʁ ɢ ɴ ʙ ʜ ʟ belong to the International Phonetic Alphabet, where ɪ is the vowel of English kit, ʏ the vowel of German hübsch, ʀ the rolled French or German r in the throat, ʁ the everyday Paris r, and ʙ a trill of the lips. The rest, ᴀ ᴄ ᴅ ᴇ ᴊ ᴋ ᴍ ᴏ ᴘ ᴛ ᴜ ᴠ ᴡ ᴢ, were encoded in 2003 for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, the system Finnish and Hungarian linguists have used since the 1900s to write down Finnish, Sámi, Estonian and their relatives, where a small capital marks a voiceless or half-voiced sound. That is why the set is uneven: it was filled in letter by letter as scholars needed each one, not designed as an alphabet. The IPA letters date from Unicode 1.1 in 1993, ꜰ and ꜱ arrived in Unicode 5.1 in 2008, and ꞯ, the last one, only in Unicode 11.0 in 2018, which is why ꞯ still shows as a box on some older phones.

There is no small caps x, and there are no small caps numbers

Unicode has never encoded a small capital X. A lowercase x already is a capital X shrunk to lowercase height, so no phonetic alphabet ever needed a separate letter for it, and no one has had a reason to propose one. Every small caps generator simply leaves x as it is, which is why ᴛᴇxᴛ and ᴇxᴀᴍᴘʟᴇ look right anyway. Some tools substitute the multiplication sign × instead; it looks similar but it is a maths operator, so it is read aloud as "times" and breaks search and spell-check. Keep the plain x.

There are no small caps digits either, because digits have no upper and lower case to shrink between. Write numbers in ordinary figures next to small caps text (ᴄʟᴀꜱꜱ ᴏꜰ 2026) or borrow a tiny-looking set from Superscript & Subscript Numbers (ᴄʟᴀꜱꜱ ᴏꜰ ²⁰²⁶) when you want the whole line to look miniature. For the same reason there is no small-cap punctuation: full stops, commas and hyphens stay as they are. Two letters also need care: ꞯ is young and ꜰ and ꜱ are rarer than the rest, so a bio full of them can show one or two empty boxes on an old device while ᴀ ʙ ᴄ display fine. A quick test is to paste your word into a chat with the friend whose phone you care about.

Small caps cousins: ᴁ ᴐ ʁ ᴎ, Greek ᴦ ᴧ ᴨ and raised ᶦ ᶰ

Beyond the plain alphabet, phonetics and old manuscripts left Unicode a drawer of small capitals with a twist, and they make good accents inside a small caps word. ᴁ is a small capital Æ and ɶ a small capital Œ, ᴕ joins O and U, and ꝶ is the medieval scribe's shorthand for the Latin ending -rum. ᴃ ᴆ ᵻ ᴌ 𝼄 ᵾ carry bars and strokes. ⱻ 𝼂 𝼐 ꟺ ᴎ ᴙ ᴚ are letters turned upside down or mirrored, ʁ is the French r again, ᴐ an open O and ʛ a G with a hook; ꭆ, ᴣ and Ɪ round out the set. The mirrored ones, ᴎ ᴙ ᴚ, are also what Backwards Letters (Mirror Text) uses for N and R.

The Uralic linguists needed small capitals of other scripts too, so Unicode also has small-cap Greek gamma, lambda, pi, rho, psi and omega, ᴦ ᴧ ᴨ ᴩ ᴪ ꭥ, and a small-cap Cyrillic el, ᴫ, encoded between 2003 and 2014. A further family floats above the baseline: ᶦ ᶧ ᶫ ᶰ ᶸ ʶ are raised small capitals used in phonetic transcription to mark a secondary quality of a sound, and Unicode 14.0 in 2021 added nine more, 𐞀 𐞄 𐞒 𐞔 𐞖 𐞜 𐞣 𐞪 𐞲, so that every IPA letter could be written superscript. The 2021 ones are still missing from most phone fonts, so use them in documents rather than bios. Last come five medieval combining letters, ᷛ ᷞ ᷟ ᷡ ᷢ: they have no width of their own and sit on top of the letter typed before them, as in aᷛ or oᷞ, the way scribes wrote abbreviations above the line.

Small caps in Word and Google Docs versus Unicode small caps

In desktop Microsoft Word, small caps are a font effect: select the text and press Ctrl+Shift+K on Windows or Cmd+Shift+K on a Mac, or open the Font dialog and tick Small caps. The letters stay ordinary A to Z underneath and only look smaller, which is the right tool for an acronym like NASA in a printed report, a chapter's first line or a name in a bibliography, the places typographers have used small capitals since the sixteenth century. That shortcut does not work in Word for the web, and Google Docs has no small caps switch at all: its Format, Text, Capitalization menu offers only lowercase, upper case and title case. That is the moment people come looking for this page and paste real small caps characters instead. On a web page the equivalent of Word's effect is the CSS rule font-variant: small-caps, which again changes the look, not the characters.

The Unicode letters have the opposite trade-off. They keep their look in a tweet, a username or a plain text box where no font effect survives, but they are different characters from A to Z. Search will not find ꜱᴀʟᴇ when someone types sale, a spell-checker underlines every word, and a screen reader reads ʜɪ as "latin letter small capital h, latin letter small capital i" or skips it, so keep them for a name or a short line, never for a paragraph someone must read with VoiceOver or TalkBack. When you need both looks, use the font effect in documents and these characters on social media. Related styles live in their own collections: full-size Bold Letters (Bold Text) and Italic Letters (Italic Text) from the maths alphabets, spaced Fullwidth Text (Vaporwave Letters), and every alphabet style together in Letter Emoji & Alphabet Symbols.

How to type small caps letters

There is no keyboard layout for small caps, so copying is the normal way: tap a letter on this page or copy a ready-made line from the combos below. For whole sentences the fsymbols small caps generator at fsymbols.com/generators/smallcaps/ converts as you type, keeping x and the digits as they are. On a phone you can save ꜱᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘꜱ words you reuse as text replacements (iOS Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement; Android Gboard, Dictionary, Personal dictionary) so that typing a shortcut produces the small caps version.

In Word and most Office apps on Windows, hold Alt and type the decimal code on the numeric keypad (ᴀ is Alt+7424, ᴇ Alt+7431, ᴏ Alt+7439), or type the hex code and press Alt+X: 1D00 then Alt+X gives ᴀ, 0299 gives ʙ, 026A gives ɪ, A731 gives ꜱ, A7AF gives ꞯ. On a Mac, the Unicode Hex Input keyboard takes the same four-digit codes while Option is held, and the Character Viewer finds them under the search "small capital". On Linux, Ctrl+Shift+U then the hex code works in most apps.