All Lowercase Letters

a stylistic choice in which all text is in lowercase letters. it can be thought of as the opposite of writing in all caps when emphasizing a point, in which case it can be used to give a melancholic feel to whatever you're writing. it is not generally thought of as orthographically correct, giving it (if only in the eyes of advertisers) a casual, hip feel.

can also occur in internet forums monitored by censorship daemons programmed to demote all-caps entries, since all-lower-case text is much more readable than no-lower-case.

also see No Punctuation Period.

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examples

Advertising

• "i'm lovin' it." actually, all mcdonalds' advertising since the switch to this slogan.
• vitamin water labels.

Art

• in addition to his more well known logo-like signature, Norman Rockwell occasionally signed his paintings in all lowercase cursive.

Fan Fiction

• the title of legolas by laura

Literature

• because it is written in the perspective of two different people, half of the john green/david levithan book Will Grayson Will Grayson is written this way.
• in Douglas Coupland's novel jpod, a number of characters from a lesbian commune spell their names entirely in lower case, because they see upper case as "privileging" certain letters over others.
• feminist author bell Hooks' pen name.
• author andrew j. offutt likes to write his name in all lowercase.
• e. e. cummings' editor published him this way to make him stand out, and now everybody writes his name this way.
• don marquis wrote a series of newspaper columns in the early 20th century supposedly typed by archy the cockroach, who, while he had the strength to work the keys (by climbing up on top of the type writer and jumping down on the keys) did not have enough strength to work the shift. there was a whole cast of characters in archy's world, including a cat mehitabel. some of the Archy and Mehitabel columns were collected into a series of books.
• in the hungarian book pál utcai fiúk (the boys from paul street) nemecsek ernő's name is written in the titular gang's book with all lower case and with black ink as a mean of dishonor. due to pop cultural osmosis, doing this deliberately in a publication became a mean of insult in hungarian.
• After the Quake's chapter titles are all written in lowercase. the english version of the book also has the title in lowercase.
• australian poet joanne burns actually changed her name to lowercase. however, she does use uppercase letters occasionally in her work.
• The Immortals Series does it on covers. even the author's name, yes.
• this is how angolan-portuguese writer valter hugo mãe writes his entire books and signs his own name.

Live Action TV

• Dinnerladies' title text.
• Jackass credits
• Thirtysomething

Music

• lots of song lyrics are written this way
  without punctuation
  to give a flow-of-consciousness feel
  and look more poetic
  see also poetry
• sillyworld by stone sour is written this way
• Tori Amos. she even has an album title in all lowercase letters (from the choirgirl hotel).
• 65daysofstatic
• theaudience
• bond, not to be confused with the other guy
• The Cars
• fun.
• Joy Electric
• the name of the swedish rock band kent is spelled, well, like that.
• k.d. lang
• maybeshewill
• mc chris
• Nine Inch Nails
• Peter Gabriel signs his work as such.
• set fire to flames
• silverchair
• slint's landmark album spiderland has (very minimal) liner notes written in this style.
• an early example is the beatles' second album with the beatles
• mothy
• iamamiwhoami; their song titles (such as "b", "u-1", and "; john") are all lowercase letters as well
• björk
• the Beastie Boys albums paul's boutique and hello nasty take this trope Up to Eleven by having the liner notes be a simple fold-out with all the lyrics printed in lowercase without punctuation, making for a Wall of Text that can be difficult to follow at times. check your head side-steps the issue entirely by not having lyrics, while ill communication has all the lyrics written normally but in an eye-strainingly small font.
• two of the founding members of the black eyed peas, will.i.am and apl.de.ap.
• Exist Trace and guitarist miko.

Networks

• Adult Swim.
• TBS is stylized with all lowercase letters, as is the slogan "very funny".

Newspaper Comics

• Jump Start uses this for the speech of small children, originally as a Translation Convention.
• moe from Calvin and Hobbes talks like this, in addition to having his own distinctive font.

Poetry

• this and lack of punctuation (other than
  parentheses) were the signature style (and it spawned plenty
  of imitators) of e e cummings poetry
• archy the cockroach types in lowercase because his body is too small to depress the shift key and another key at the same time.

Video Games

• Heretic and Hexen, except for the title logos.
• Cat Planet
• The white chamber (title of the game)
• chaos from Xenosaga which is done in contrast to the all caps KOS-MOS
• planet's speech in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is never capitalized. it also constantly refers to specific people as "earth<name>" (e.g. earthdierdre).
• luminesweeper for Game Boy Advance uses lowercase arial bold throughout its on-screen text.
• Skate is always marketed as skate.
• vell-os telepathy in ev nova is depicted as all-lowercase with No Punctuation Period.

Web Comics

• Gunnerkrigg Court uses the ale and wenches font, which has some letters look the same in uppercase and lowercase. tom siddell's melancholic use of this and No Punctuation Period are also evident in his Concept Art here.
• because most dialogue in Homestuck is typed, not spoken, several characters 'speak' like this, including jade, john, dave, aradia, sollux, nepeta and eridan.
  • some exiles also type like this, but only because they have never typed before.
    • though more of them talk more emphatically.
• Minus (title text)
• Pictures for Sad Children uses this to add to its cynical and fatalist tone
• xkcd in some of the earlier comics.
• in Order of the Stick orcs talk like this.
  • capital letters intrigue mungu.
  • eric greenhilt too. "hi roy! wanna play blocks with me?"
• Damaged Tape used to be titled in all lowercase, before it moved to an official website—the titles of each new strip are still this trope, however.
• achewood's roast beef speaks like this dogg complete with no punctuation because he is hella quiet and subdued very much a defining characteristic
• the inhabitants of Monospace speak this way.
• Chainsawsuit, though it occasionally uses capital letters for emphasis.
• davan in Something Positive writes like this in instant messenger. it becomes a minor plot point when eva's ex pretends to be davan online, but fails to fool jason because he writes with correct capitalization.
• ickle's name from My Milk Toof is always spelt in lowercase to exaggerate his size.
• alda henning from the breeder arc in unity, who only capitalizes the name of her mistress
  • also, the cartoonist goes by an all-lowercase "fluffy," although this is claimed more to be for typographic purity

Web Original

• this famous Metroid fansite uses this style.
• sloshy from "Homestar Runner" uses this in their logo.
• indie developer auntie pixelante's blog.
• mr.coconut, the neopets editorial's most recent meme.
• as a result of originally being forum names, a number of lets players. ones that come up regularly here include Slowbeef, Pokecapn and Medibot.
• YouTube video captions generated using their transcribe audio feature are often like this.
• the Asdfmovie series.

tv tropes wiki

• this page, obviously.
• the indices to the bottom-left of every page.
• some tropers like to do this with their troper names.
• the tv tropes logo

Real Life

• Monocameral scripts, such as the Georgian Alphabet, Mkhdruli, due to not having cases, by default do this.
• herbert bayer, from the famous german bauhaus school of design, banned the use of uppercase letters in school materials in 1925 ("we only use small characters because it saves time. moreover, why have 2 alphabets when one will do? why write capitals if we cannot speak capitals?"). the most iconic "bauhaus" typeform is based on his "universal" typeface.
• anyone whose typewriter or computer keyboard has a broken shift key two broken shift keys and a broken caps lock key. or anyone who just doesn't care about grammar. there are people who don't look too kindly on that kind of behavior, of course.
• social media researcher danah boyd's name.
• porn star jessica drake signs her name like this.
• high school debate personality jon sharpe's name.
• Serial Killer ted bundy always signed letters like this: "peace, ted"
• a whole lot of internet forum users. sometimes inverted by having every letter capitalized like Title Case.
• the current (as of 2009) pepsi logo
• also the current (as of 2000) bp logo
• officially, the "it's a small world" attraction at Disney Theme Parks is "properly" spelled with all lowercase letters. it's still frequently referred to using capitalization though, even by disney themselves.
• some grammar textbooks for grade school kids will have exercises with the directions to rewrite sentences written like this with properly capitalized words.
• many transcriptions of latin and greek texts use only lower-case letters. this is because the original texts in the classical period inverted this trope - they had no capital or lower case distinction, and everything was capitalized. it is much easier on the eyes to read all lower-case letters, however, in most modern typefaces, so the modern practice inverts the completely capitalized original text. such ancient texts in their original forms also contained No Punctuation Period nor any spaces, but are given spaces and some punctuation in modern renditions.
  • original texts in greek minuscule and roman-era latin cursive (to a lesser extent than greek, as many of the letterforms are too different from their modern counterparts to be recognisable) play this trope straight, however.
• elementary school students learning cursive are usually taught lowercase letters first, resulting in this when they attempt to write names or sentences in cursive before finishing the unit.
• the guardian newspapers title is written like this, along with the rest of the paper.
• Zachary Quinto writes his rare blog postings and his twitter in all lowercase letters. sometimes without paragraph breaks, as well.
• christopher poole (aka, moot, mootykins) creator of 4chan and it's spin-off canv.as always types like this when replying to his users, due to the nature of users in question no one knows if it's purposeful or if he's a moron.