Camel case
term for the notation where uppercase letters are used within words for specific purposes, such as making word boundaries visible after concatenating multiple words into a single string, with the first word's initial letter in lowercase
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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Camel case” is term for the notation where uppercase letters are used within words for specific purposes, such as making word boundaries visible after concatenating multiple words into a single string, with the first word's initial letter in lowercase. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Camel, case and term, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “term for the notation where uppercase letters are used within words for specific purposes, such as making word boundaries visible after concatenating multiple words into a single string, with the first word's initial letter in lowercase” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18710. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990 and 1813.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Camel case” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.