A glossary of aptly capitalised names

This is a living document that I'll update every now and again.

Gutenberg's printing press, a sure cornerstone of technological advancement in respectable 4x games, did not only usher in the age of enlightenment, but also solidified our familiar Latin alphabet into its contemporary majuscule and minuscule forms.

Its influence is such that its operators' vernacular became the de facto language of (colloquial) typography:

• the "cases" (lower and upper) actually used to refer to the physical boxes holding the movable types to be used in printing;
• these families themselves were "fonts", from the French word for "cast iron", "fonte";
• the "leading" was referring to the strips of lead placed between lines of type (and therefore pronounced "ledding"!);
• heck, we still talk today of "the press" when talking of the media in general!

Yet even now, we—the impersonal collective "we"—still come from time to time to ask ourselves what "casing" would be most appropriate for the occasion... Or worse yet, not even bat an eye as we read of the git [sic] VCS.

It's Git.
There's also GitHub and GitLab, but Gitea; BitKeeper but Bitbucket; SourceForge but Codeberg...

Ultimately, while we do not have to like how NVIDIA or Neovim are spelled, we can still strive to get it right. Let's jump right in, alphabetically:

• It's braille

• It's ccjmne

• It's ECMAScript

• It's FFmpeg

  Seriously; for "Fast-Forward MPEG", check out this thread on the FFmpeg mailing list.

  A quaint bit I found there: "[...] Linus insisting on using the evil BitKeeper system for the Linux source (although IIRC they moved to something more sane eventually)".

• It's Git

• It's GNOME

  While the project has been rebranding lately, there is no (publicly disclosed) intention by the GNOME Foundation to alter the beloved name and logo anytime soon, though the community is talking about this.

  Oh, and, as seems to be customary within the GNU community, this acronym is rather a "backronym", purportedly standing for "GNU Network Object Model Environment".

• It's GNU

  A most notorious recursive acronym, standing for "GNU's Not Unix".

• It's GnuPG

  Another masterful initialism, "GNU Privacy Guard" offers the gpg utility as an alternative to the pgp tool implementing "Pretty Good Privacy".

• It's the Internet

• It's an iPhone, an iPad, an iMac

• It's LaTeX

  Not the rubbery material, and certainly not pronounced like it either.

• It's macOS

• It's niri

• It's Node.js, Next.js and Nuxt

  Ah, it used to be NuxtJS, quite amusingly. But we shouldn't care much anyway, since Svelte is really the superior alternative in all matters.

• It's NVIDIA

  But the solution, in 2025, is AMD.

• It's Sass, but it's SCSS

  I can actually see the casing difference actually making sense even intuitively, when you consider their history.

• It's Syncthing

  Let's appreciate their FAQ addressing this very question so clearly.

• It's tmux

• It's Unicode

• It's Vim

  Well-known to mean "Vi IMproved", yet it originally stood for the less glamorous "Vi IMitation".

• It's VS Code

  Well, it may not seem like it, but both are used even in official communication. The community overwhelmingly settled on VS Code, in part because Visual Studio is an entirely different tool.

• It's the WHATWG

  That may not be what we wish, but that is undoubtedly "what we get".

  It stands for "Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group", and is apparently pronounced whatever you want, so long as the first part is read as "what".

• It's the (World Wide) Web

  We few pained by the missing hyphen in "world-wide" may find solace in the common parlance largely favouring "worldwide" altogether.

• It's WebAssembly and WebSocket

• It's Wi-Fi

  Ahem. I'd love to tell you how it came to be called that, but I'd frankly do a poorer job than a lot of articles out there. I have in mind a particular documentary, which I sadly cannot find again.