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Camel Case ○｜Definition｜1st｜20260605184914-00-⌔
Camel case
Camel case (sometimes stylized autologically as camelCase or CamelCase, also known as camel caps or more formally as medial capitals) is a writing format practice of writing phrases with capitalized words and yet without spaces or punctuation. The practice has various names and conventions. The earliest known occurrence of a term for this style, InterCaps, was on Usenet in April 1990.
The use of medial capitals as a convention in the regular spelling of everyday texts is rare, but is used in some languages as a solution to particular problems which arise when two words or segments are combined. In the scholarly transliteration of languages written in other scripts, medial capitals are used in similar situations. Medial capitals are sometimes traditionally used in abbreviations to reflect the capitalization that the words would have when written out in full, and they have come into use in unpunctuated abbreviations of academic titles, such as PhD and BSc, which now often replace Ph.D. and B.Sc.
The first systematic and widespread use of medial capitals for technical purposes was the notation for chemical formulas invented by the Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius in 1813. Since the early 20th century, medial capitals have occasionally been used for corporate names and product trademarks. In the 1970s and 1980s, medial capitals were adopted as a standard or alternative naming convention for multi-word identifiers in several computer programming languages. The use of medial caps for compound identifiers is recommended by the coding style guidelines of many organizations and software projects. Camel case has been criticized as impairing readability, as it creates long compound words strewn with capital letters.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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