Combine Words Styles: Camel, Pascal, Snake, Kebab Case

The most popular ways to combine words into a single string:

There are a great number of algorithms for combining words. Here is a few very common ones:

  • flatcase

  • kebab-case. Also called:

    caterpillar-case
    dash-case
    hyphen-case
    lisp-case
    spinal-case
    css-case
  • camelCase

  • PascalCase or CapitalCamelCase

  • snake_case or c_case

  • UPPER_CASE or MACRO_CASE

  • COBOL-CASE or TRAIN-CASE

The commonly used strategies for combining words are:

  • camelCase
  • PascalCase
  • snake_case
  • kebab-case

We’ll go over those here.

Camel Case (camelCase)

Camel case combines words by capitalizing all words following the first word and removing the space, as follows:

Raw: user login count

Camel Case: userLoginCount

This is a very popular way to combine words to form a single concept. It is often used as a convention in variable declaration in many languages.

Pascal Case (PascalCase)

Pascal case combines words by capitalizing all words (even the first word) and removing the space, as follows:

Raw: user login count

Pascal Case: UserLoginCount

This is also a very popular way to combine words to form a single concept. It is often used as a convention in declaring classes in many languages.

Snake Case (snake_case)

Snake case combines words by replacing each space with an underscore (_).

Raw: user login count

Snake Case: user_login_count

It is used conventionally in declaring database field names.

Snake Upper Case (SNAKE_UPPER_CASE)

In the "all caps" version, all letters are capitalized, as follows:

Raw: user login count

Snake Case (All Caps): USER_LOGIN_COUNT

This style is often used as a convention in declaring constants in many languages.

Kebab Case (kebab-case)

Kebab case combines words by replacing each space with a dash (-), as follows:

Raw: user login count

Kebab Case: user-login-count

This style is often used in URLs. For example, www.blog.com/cool-article-1. It is a nice, clean, human-readable way to combine the words.