capitalization - Words that change meaning when the first letter is capitalized



What words change meaning when the first letter is capitalised? The only word with this property that comes to mind is polish/Polish (the pronunciation also changes in this case, but that's not a necessity part of what I'm asking for).



Answer



I can't think of any other word that changes its meaning so completely. Most often, a word changes because a noun becomes a proper noun, usually either a brand or a place where something commonly known originated. The Polish/polish pair is different; the proper noun (adjective actually) has nothing to do with the common noun.


For instance:



  • "china", uncapitalized, is a plate. "China", capitalized, is a country.

  • "comet" is an astronomical object. "Comet" is a cleaning powder.

  • "burgundy" is a color, and a wine of that color. "Burgundy" is the French region that produces the wine.

  • Similarly, "cheddar" is a cheese, and "Cheddar" is an English city where the cheese became known.

  • A "jack" lifts cars up, but if a "Jack" can do that I wouldn't want to fight him.

  • "coke" is most properly the term for a fuel product made from destructive distillation of coal via high heat. "Coke" is the well-known synonym for Coca-Cola, which gets its name from the original (but LONG since discontinued) use of coca leaf extracts (i.e. cocaine) in the drink.

  • Here's a Polish/polish one: turkey's the bird, while Turkey's the country. I originally thought they had nothing to do with each other, but it seems that the bird was introduced to Europe through the country.

  • Most other nationalities were careful enough to encourage different Latin spellings of their names versus the common nouns that are homonymous, but a listener still has to check for context to know whether a person is speaking of Finns, Czechs and Kurds, and not fins, checks and curds.


EDIT: For posterity, the term for these words is "Capitonym".


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