COBOL Words

COBOL words must be character-strings from the set of letters, digits, the hyphen, and the underscore. (The hyphen and the underscore cannot appear as the first or last character, however.) In the ILE COBOL language, each lowercase letter is generally equivalent to the corresponding uppercase letter.

The five types of COBOL words are:
The following rules apply to all COBOL words that are not special character words within a source program: