Is there a word for "capitalization" in Spanish?

Question

This site has multiple questions about capitalization. I was about to create a tag to group them (like the English site does, which is the recommended place to check for standard ways of tagging), but I noticed there is no direct word for the concept in Spanish.

We do say uso de mayúsculas, but I cannot find a single word to convey its meaning. I am afraid capitalización would be a false friend, since it would kind of mean "to make a place be the capital city of a country/region".

So: is there a word in Spanish for capitalization?

Answer 1

Indeed, the word capitalización is a false friend in Spanish. It means "the act or process of capitalizing", but capitalizar in Spanish means:

capitalizar

1. tr. Econ. Proveer de capital a una empresa.
2. tr. Econ. Convertir algo en capital.
3. tr. Econ. Determinar el valor de una inversión en función de las rentas que ha de generar.
4. tr. Utilizar en propio beneficio una acción o situación, aunque sean ajenas. El alcalde capitalizó el triunfo del equipo de fútbol.

Nothing to do with the use of capital letters, even though in Spanish you can say letra capital for a letter in uppercase. In Spanish we can also say:

letra versal

1. f. Impr. letra mayúscula.

And thus we have:

letra versalilla, o letra versalita

1. f. Impr. Mayúscula igual en tamaño a la minúscula de la misma clase.

But that is not exactly the same as you refer to. There could be a verb like versalizar (which sounds much finer that mayusculizar), but there is not. And I cannot find anything else in the DIRAE, so my choices for such a tag would be:

• Uso-de-mayúsculas
• Mayúscula-inicial
• Mayúsculas
• Versales