Drop. caps. – short for dropped capitals – are large letters placed at the beginnings of paragraphs – usually about three lines tall.
This paragraph has a dropped capital at the start. The first letter of the first word is much larger than the other letters in the paragraph. The rest of the first word and the rest of the paragraph flow around the dropped capital.
Typically just the first letter is dropped, but sometimes the first two, three, four letters will be, or the first word, first two words, et cetera will be. The number of letters or words to set as dropped, as well as whether to use dropped capitals at all, is a style choice – it’s generally more common in ‘serious’ works, such as novels, other fiction, and non-fiction that is more technical or less image-based.
Dropped capitals are the lesser cousin of full illumination. In a fully illuminated manuscript, the first letter of a paragraph, as well as the first few words, will not just be set in a larger font, but they will be made into full illustrations – usually of a theme that is relevant to the topic of the book. Full illumination, although very nice to look at, is not common in many modern books.
Many common typesetting programs will allow you to do dropped capitals – even Microsoft Word will do it. However, because dropped capitals – in such programs – don’t really take into account the different shapes of the letters (a capital A being a very different shape to a capital T, for example), dropped capitals can end up looking a bit odd – the spacing around them not really being right. If you’re writing fiction, it may be more worthwhile to go for simpler, black-and-white illuminated letters – which are a kind of half-way between drop. caps. and full illumination, and are not too difficult to make or expensive to buy.
← Writing FAQs