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I'm a programmer and I often see the abbreviation ID (capitalized) in technical documents and code. Is this correct, or should it be id?

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2 Answers

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In English, both letters should be capitalized ("ID"). The lower case word "id" has a specific meaning that does not invoke the meaning "identifier," or "identification." In documentation it should be spelled out (ID abbreviates two different words, after all), or be in all caps.

However, programming languages are not exactly English. Styles vary widely. The de facto standard nowadays seems to be CamelCase, in which even identifiers such as acronyms capitalize the first letter only:

Id, myId, aSpecificId

But the whole question is prone to "religious wars" in the programming world, and there is no definitive answer. Some insist that the first letter always be capitalized, some the first letter only of following words (sometimes known as "camelCase" to distinguish from "CamelCase", [sic] and so on and so forth.

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Thanks. I'm not concerned with the programming world so much, but proper English usage. (BTW -- most C/C++ libraries do NOT use camel case style, so I would not say this is NOT the de facto style standard...) :-) – Jeremyx Jan 23 at 20:15
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In common English, ID is used from common practice. In programming, though, it's id. Why? We use is so much!

The reason it's capitalized for common English is that there's no period at the end of the abbreviation, unlike abbreviations like tsp., lb., or abbr. Abbreviations also see demotion from capitalization by common use. This is what happened to id in programming.

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I am a programmer, and have been for decades, but I have never once used id. Not even in source code, let alone in the documentation. It's always ID. Same for my colleagues. So I'd like to see your statement backed up with actual data. Otherwise it's just your anecdotal evidence vs. my anecdotal evidence. – RegDwighт♦ Jan 23 at 21:16
Hard thing to find. It must be just anecdotal evidence. I'd never seen id capitalized ID before, but almost all of my experience in programming has been academic, either research programming or otherwise academic programming. It may be one of those academic vs corporate coding differences I seem to discover all the time. – Kylamus Jan 23 at 22:40
I don't think you're going to get much anything other than anecdotal 'evidence' on this one though. The answer to the original question is that it can be either. I've seen more of id in my programming experience. – Kylamus Jan 23 at 22:43
The Java libraries (which became something of a de facto standard) use mixed case even for acronyms that are usually all caps. So: transactionId, cf. siteUrl. C and C++ programmers not influenced by Java would have transactionID or transaction_id, or, for the hard core, x. My preference is for the all caps version even in Java. Outside source code I would always set in all caps, to avoid confusion with the Freudian construct. – Andrew Lazarus Jan 24 at 21:29

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