Take the 2-minute tour ×
English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It's 100% free, no registration required.

Possible Duplicate:
Capitalisation of nouns in English (historically)

After reading a recipe from 1747, I noticed that all of the nouns are capitalized. Is that a normal thing for that era? It's when things like "Fresh Butter" is in capitals that I started to wonder.

share|improve this question

marked as duplicate by RegDwigнt Sep 9 '12 at 20:05

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

add comment

1 Answer

I searched Google Books for "fresh butter" (it's not case-sensitive), and got 20 results, of which 8 had the word "Butter" capitalised (but only one of them also capitalised "Fresh"). I think at least a couple of the citations were duplicates.

On that basis, I'd say OP's example wasn't abnormal, but it wasn't "the norm" either.


The full story of how standard capitalisation evolved/reduced several hundred years ago is discussed (sometimes cogently) in tchrist's link above. A key point made by user:holgate there is...

The Change didn't occur at once, by some top-down Decree, but happened over a long period of Time, and according to Fashion. Regular Nouns go from Capitalised to lower-case; emphasised Nouns go from Italicised-capitalised to italicised or roman lower-case, depending on House Stile. Certain proper Nouns go from ꜱᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘꜱ to Capitalised.

I've no reason to doubt "holgate" is correct in saying David Foxon's Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade is the canonical Work on this Topic.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.
{"cc_re__cc_re__cc_by_sa_3_0": ["        <li><a href=\"http://area51.stackexchange.com\" title=\"proposing new sites in the Stack Exchange network\">Area 51</a></li>\r\n                        <li><a href=\"http://careers.stackoverflow.com\">Stack Overflow Careers</a></li>\r\n                    \r\n                </ol>\r\n            </td>\r\n    </tr>\r\n</table>\r\n                </div>\r\n            </div>\r\n\r\n            <div id=\"copyright\">\r\n                site design / logo &#169; 2014 stack exchange inc; user contributions licensed under <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\" rel=\"license\">cc by-sa 3.0</a> \r\n                with <a href=\"http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/\" rel=\"license\">attribution required</a>\r\n            </div>\r\n            <div id=\"svnrev\">\r\n                rev 2014.7.10.1699\r\n            </div>\r\n            \r\n        </div>\r\n    </div>\r\n    <noscript>\r\n        <div id=\"noscript-warning\">English Language &amp; Usage Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled<img src=\"http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc.gif\" alt=\"\" "], "copyright__copyright__copyright": ["Regular Nouns go from Capitalised to lower-case; emphasised Nouns go from Italicised-capitalised to italicised or roman lower-case, depending on House Stile. Certain proper Nouns go from \ua731\u1d0d\u1d00\u029f\u029f \u1d04\u1d00\u1d18\ua731 to Capitalised.\n\nI've no reason to doubt \"holgate\" is correct in saying David Foxon's Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade is the canonical Work on this Topic.\n\nshare|improve this answer\nadd comment\n\nNot the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question."]}