Every word has been knocked to lowercase. Your job is to put the capitals back exactly where they belong, and nowhere else.
A run is five sentences with every capital stripped out: two short ones, one medium and two long ones packed with traps, drawn from 110 sentences. Tap each word that should start with a capital. That means the first word of the sentence, the pronoun I, and the names of people, places, days, months and holidays. It also covers titles such as Doctor or Aunt in front of a name, and family words like Mom used in place of a name. Then press Check.
Medium and long sentences mix real names with words that only look like names: "every august mom, dad, and uncle phil drive north to a cabin near lake superior." The answer has eight capitals: Every (it opens the sentence), August, Mom and Dad (used as names), Uncle and Phil, and Lake and Superior. That's 80 points. "North" and "cabin" stay lowercase.
Suppose you cap "north" as well and miss "Dad". That is 7 right (70), one miss (−4) and one over-cap (−9), for 57. Compare another sentence in the set, "When my dad fixed the boat…": there "dad" follows my, so it is an ordinary noun and stays lowercase. The same word can go either way, and the sentence decides.
Caps Lock turns capitalization rules into a quick tap-to-fix puzzle, building the proofreading habit of catching what should be capital.
The words upper case and lower case come from letterpress printing. Capitals were kept in a separate shallow tray, or type case, placed above the one that held the small letters. Divided pairs of cases were in use in what is now Belgium by 1563 and in England by 1588.
The two alphabets were not always used together. The Carolingian minuscule was developed by Alcuin for the court of Charlemagne. According to the history of letter case, it grew out of earlier cursive scripts and spread across Europe because small letters were faster to read.
Which words get a capital has changed over time. German still capitalizes every noun, and English did much the same, mainly in the 17th and 18th centuries. Modern English capitalization has trimmed that back to sentence openings, proper nouns and a list of conventions. Even those conventions are not fully agreed for place names. Days and months are capitalized and seasons are not, and no logic will tell you that; you have to learn the list.
The game's name comes from the keyboard. The Caps Lock key began as the shift lock on mechanical typewriters, which held the shift down so that every key typed its upper character.
Caps Lock is an original, free browser word game built for PlayPendium. Its 110 sentences are written to put a trap next to each real name: a season beside a month, my mom beside Mom, a plain river beside the Hudson River.