Words that change meaning when the first letter is capitalized [closed]

Question

What words change meaning when the first letter is capitalised? The only word with this property that comes to mind is polish.

Answer 1

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"; more information and a lot more examples are here at Annie's Annex.