Convert to Lowercase

How to convert text to lowercase

1. Paste or type your text in the Your text box, or press Open file to load a plain-text file (.txt, .csv, .md and similar). Press Example to see how it works first.
2. Read the result in the Result box. It updates as you type; there is nothing to set and no button to press.
3. Press Copy to put the lowercase text on your clipboard, or Download .txt to save it as a file.
4. Keep going if you need to. Use as input moves the result into the top box (with Undo to go back), and the links under Continue with this text open the same text in the uppercase, sentence case or capitalize each word tools.

Exactly what changes

The converter applies the standard Unicode lowercase mapping to every character, the same rule browsers use for lowercasing text. A character changes only if Unicode defines a lowercase form for it; everything else is copied as it is.

Spacing is never touched: double spaces, tabs, Windows line breaks (CRLF) and empty lines come out exactly as they went in, so the result has the same number of lines as your input. Text with no capital letters comes back unchanged.

There are no exceptions for names or acronyms. NASA becomes nasa, iPhone becomes iphone and McDonald becomes mcdonald. That is what “all lowercase” means, and it is what you want for data such as email lists and tags. If you want normal prose with proper nouns kept, use the sentence case converter, which keeps words such as iPhone and YouTube as written.

Special letters and Unicode details

A few letters follow rules worth knowing, all taken from the Unicode case mappings:

• Greek final sigma. A capital Σ at the end of a word becomes the final form ς, and elsewhere σ: ΟΔΟΣ ΣΟΦΙΑ becomes οδος σοφια.
• German ß. The capital ẞ becomes ß, and STRASSE becomes strasse. The converter cannot know which words were spelled with ß before they were capitalized, so it does not turn ss back into ß.
• Turkish dotted İ. The capital İ becomes a plain i followed by a combining dot above (U+0307), so İSTANBUL becomes i̇stanbul, which shows an extra dot in many fonts. Run the result through remove accents to get istanbul. The plain capital I always becomes a dotted i, even if your browser is set to Turkish or Azeri, because the converter uses the language-neutral mapping rather than the Turkish rule that gives dotless ı.
• Full-width letters used in Chinese and Japanese text, such as ＡＢＣ, become full-width small letters ａｂｃ.
• Circled letters and Roman numerals have lowercase forms: Ⓐ Ⅻ becomes ⓐ ⅻ.
• Styled “fancy” letters such as 𝐁𝐎𝐋𝐃 from a bold text generator are separate math symbols in Unicode, not capitals, so they stay as they are.

Very long texts are fine. Everything runs on your device, and with large pastes the result waits for a short pause in typing before it updates.

Fixing caps lock and inverted text

The most common reason to lowercase text is a paragraph typed with caps lock on. Lowercasing alone fixes the shouting but also removes the capitals that belong there, so for prose use two steps:

Going through lowercase first matters here: the sentence case tool keeps words with mixed capitals as they are, because they look like brand names, so inverted words like nAME would survive. After the second step, capitalize the remaining proper nouns (Jane, NASA) by hand.

When all lowercase is the right choice

• Email lists and CRM exports. Spreadsheets and deduplication tools that compare text exactly treat [email protected] and [email protected] as two different entries. Lowercase the list, then remove duplicate lines.
• Tags, keywords and hashtags. Keyword lists from different sources mix SEO, Seo and seo; lowercasing makes them comparable before you sort or count them.
• URLs and file names. A single all-lowercase style for links and file names means nobody has to guess which letters were capitals. The slug generator lowercases and adds hyphens in one step.
• Code and data. Normalizing user input, column names or SQL keywords before comparing or pasting them.
• Style. Some brands, captions and social posts use all lowercase on purpose.

Lowercase in Word, Google Docs, Excel and Sheets

If the text is already in a document, you can often change it in place:

Shift+F3 in Word cycles through lowercase, UPPERCASE and Capitalize Each Word, so press it again if you pass the one you want. Microsoft notes that Word for the web does not have the Change case command, which is one case where pasting the text here is quicker. In spreadsheets, LOWER returns a new value rather than changing the cell, so copy the column and paste it back as values if you want to replace the original. For more editing shortcuts, see the keyboard shortcuts guide.

Questions