Typographers have had small capitals for five centuries. Unicode never encoded them as a style, so the sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘs and ᵗⁱⁿʸ letters you can paste come from somewhere else entirely: alphabets linguists built to write down sounds. That works for most of the alphabet and leaves a few letters with no match at all.
Real Small Caps Are a Font Feature
In a well-made typeface, small capitals are separately drawn letters: capital shapes at roughly the height of a lowercase x, with strokes as heavy as the lowercase so they sit evenly in a line. Fonts that have them expose them through the OpenType smcp feature, and CSS turns them on with font-variant: small-caps.
That is formatting, like bold, so it disappears when the text is pasted somewhere plain. It also explains why Unicode never added a small-caps alphabet: a style of the same letters belongs in the font, not in the character set.
What Unicode does have are a few dozen small-capital letters that are letters in their own right, each with a distinct meaning in phonetic transcription. Strung together, they spell English words in something that looks like small caps.
Borrowed From Phonetics
Eight small capitals are part of the International Phonetic Alphabet: ʙ, ɢ, ʜ, ɪ, ʟ, ɴ, ʀ and ʏ, each a separate sound, such as ʀ for the uvular trill of French and German. They have been in Unicode's IPA Extensions block since 1993.
Most of the rest come from the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, used to transcribe Finnish, Hungarian and related languages, which Unicode added to the Phonetic Extensions block in 2003: ᴀ, ᴄ, ᴅ, ᴇ, ᴊ, ᴋ, ᴍ, ᴏ, ᴘ, ᴛ, ᴜ, ᴠ, ᴡ and ᴢ. Small capital F and S, ꜰ and ꜱ, arrived in 2008.
That leaves two gaps. Unicode has no small capital X, so x stays as an ordinary lowercase letter. A small capital Q was added in 2018, but few fonts include it, so this tool uses ǫ, an o with an ogonek, which most people read as q at small sizes.
Tiny Text Is Superscript
The tiny style uses modifier letters, raised small letters that phonetics uses to mark things like aspiration, the puff of air written ʰ in [pʰ]. Combined with the superscript digits, they cover nearly the whole alphabet.
The lowercase gap is q. A modifier letter small q was only encoded in 2021, and almost no phone fonts draw it yet, so the tool leaves q at full size and tells you when your text contains one. Capitals are patchier still: there are raised capital forms for most letters but not C, F, Q, S, X, Y or Z. Six of those fall back to the raised lowercase letter, which reads better than a full-size capital in the middle of tiny text; Q has no raised form in either case and stays as it is.
Superscript digits are complete, along with raised plus, minus, equals and parentheses, so tiny text also handles simple notes like x² or a footnote marker ¹.
Why Small Text Costs Unevenly on X
X counts characters below U+1100 as one and most others as two. The phonetic letters come from blocks on both sides of that line.
| Characters | Block | Cost per character on X |
|---|---|---|
| ʙ ɢ ʜ ɪ ʟ ɴ ʀ ʏ | IPA Extensions | 1 |
| ᴀ ᴄ ᴅ ᴇ ᴊ ᴋ ᴍ ᴏ ᴘ ᴛ ᴜ ᴠ ᴡ ᴢ | Phonetic Extensions | 2 |
| ꜰ ꜱ | Latin Extended-D | 2 |
| ʰ ʲ ʳ ʷ ʸ | Spacing Modifier Letters | 1 |
| ᵃ ᵇ ᵈ ᵉ ᵍ ᵏ ᵐ ᵒ ᵖ ᵗ ᵘ ᵛ | Phonetic Extensions | 2 |
| ¹ ² ³ | Latin-1 Supplement | 1 |
| ⁰ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ | Superscripts and Subscripts | 2 |
Small text is the hardest style to read
Tiny letters render at roughly half the size of the surrounding text, which on a phone feed can drop below what many people can read comfortably. Use it for a short aside or a signature line, never for information someone needs.
Make your text small
Small caps and tiny letters, with any letter Unicode is missing pointed out.
What Screen Readers Hear
Because each of these characters is a phonetic symbol, assistive technology reads it as one. Depending on the screen reader and its settings, ᴛɪɴʏ may be announced as a run of names like "latin letter small capital T", spelled out, or skipped entirely, and modifier letters are often announced as "modifier letter small" followed by the letter.
Search has the same problem. Small capitals have no relationship to ordinary letters in Unicode's normalization rules, so no search engine treats ꜱᴀʟᴇ as sale. Tiny letters do fold back under compatibility normalization, but most platform search does not apply it.
So small text works best the way typographers always used small caps: for a few words where the look matters more than the content, such as a tagline under a name, never for the content itself.
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