Small caps generator

In typography, small caps are a separate set of capitals designed to sit at the x-height, the height of a lowercase x. A well-made typeface draws them with strokes as heavy as its lowercase letters, so they don't look like shrunken, spindly capitals. Book designers reach for them where full capitals would shout.

• Many English Bibles print Lᴏʀᴅ, a capital L followed by small capitals, where the Hebrew text has the divine name YHWH.
• Times and eras such as 7 ᴘᴍ and 1200 ʙᴄ look less bulky in small caps than in full capitals.
• The first few words of a chapter are often set in small caps, leading out of a large opening letter.

The letters this generator makes imitate that look in places where you can't format text, like an Instagram bio. They're a stand-in, not the real thing: their height and weight depend on your phone's fonts, not on a typeface designed around them.

Unicode never encoded small caps as a style for ordinary text. Small capital letters were added one at a time, for linguists who needed them as symbols for particular sounds, and the generator gathers them from several places:

So a word in small caps is a patchwork of phonetic symbols that happen to look like a matching set. ꜱᴍᴀʟʟ alone draws on three of those blocks.

Two letters needed workarounds. Unicode did eventually add a true small capital Q, but it came much later than the others and is less likely to display, so the generator uses ǫ, an o with a hook underneath. In a word like ǫᴜɪᴢ it passes for a q at a glance.

X has no small capital at all, and it barely matters: a lowercase x already has the shape of a small capital X, so ʙᴏx looks right. In most fonts the same is nearly true of c, o, v, w and z, which is why ᴄ, ᴏ, ᴠ, ᴡ and ᴢ look almost identical to their lowercase twins.

Tip: Check a small-caps name on a second phone. If ꜰ or ꜱ show as boxes there, every f and s in your text disappears, and in English that's a lot of letters.

Small caps keep a level baseline, so they read like a quiet heading. Tiny text floats above the line and suits a word or two, not a sentence. Wide text goes the other way, stretching each letter sideways, which gives a retro, vaporwave feel.

There's a difference under the surface as well. Most tiny letters and all the wide ones carry an official Unicode mapping back to ordinary letters, so software that normalizes text can read them as words. Small caps have no such mapping: to a search box, ꜱᴍᴀʟʟ is five unusual letters, not the word small.

Digits don't change, because Unicode has no small-capital numbers. In “small batch since 2019” the year stands a head taller than the words beside it. Typographers solve this with old-style figures, numbers that sit lower and blend with small caps, but those exist only as alternate shapes inside real fonts, not as characters you can paste.

Capitals behave differently too. The generator turns both a and A into ᴀ, so the line between capital and small letters disappears. For the book look, with a full capital at the start of a word, type the first letter in plain text and convert the rest: Lᴏʀᴅ, Sᴛᴜᴅɪᴏ, Bᴀᴋᴇʀʏ.

Tip: Spelling a number out keeps the whole line in small caps, as in ꜱɪɴᴄᴇ ᴛᴡᴇɴᴛʏ ɴɪɴᴇᴛᴇᴇɴ. It's longer, but nothing sticks up.