Capitalization

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Template:Short description Template:Hatnote group

The capital letter "A" in the Latin alphabet, followed by its lowercase equivalent, in sans serif and serif typefaces respectively

Capitalization (American English) or capitalisation (Commonwealth English) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term also may refer to the use of uppercase letters in general, or the choice between uppercase and lowercase.

Conventional writing systems (orthographies) for different languages have different conventions for capitalization, for example, the capitalization of titles. Conventions also vary, to a lesser extent, between different style guides. In addition to the Latin script, capitalization also affects the Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian and Greek alphabets.

The full rules of capitalization in English are complicated. The rules have also changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer words. The conventions used in an 18th-century document will be unfamiliar to a modern reader; for instance, many common nouns were capitalized.

The systematic use of capitalized and uncapitalized words in running text is called "mixed case".

Parts of speech

Owing to the essentially arbitrary nature of orthographic classification and the existence of variant authorities and local house styles, questionable capitalization of words is not uncommon, even in respected newspapers and magazines. Most publishers require consistency, at least within the same document, in applying a specified standard: this is described as "house style".

Pronouns

Template:Unsourced

  • In English, the subjective form of the singular first-person pronoun, "I", is capitalized, along with all its contractions such as I'll and I'm. Objective and possessive forms ("me", "my", and "mine") are not.
  • Many European languages traditionally capitalize nouns and pronouns used to refer to God, including references to Jesus Christ (reverential capitals): hallowed be Thy name, look what He has done. Some English authors capitalize any word referring to God: the Lamb, the Almighty; some capitalize "Thy Name". These practices have become much less common in English in the 20th and 21st centuries.
  • Some languages capitalize a royal we (Template:Lang), such as in German.

2nd-person pronouns

Many languages distinguish between formal and informal 2nd-person pronouns.

Nouns

  • The various languages and dialects in the High German family, including Standard German and Luxembourgish, are the only major languages using the Latin alphabet in which all nouns (including nominalized verbs) are capitalized.<ref name="Gschossmann-2014">Template:Cite book</ref> This was also practiced in other Germanic languages (mainly due to German influence):
  • In nearly all European languages, single-word proper nouns, including personal names, are capitalized (like France or Moses). Multiple-word proper nouns usually follow the traditional English rules for publication titles (as in Robert the Bruce).
  • In English, the names of days of the week, months and languages are capitalized, as are demonyms like Englishman, Arab. In other languages, practice varies, but almost all languages other than German and Luxembourgish (which capitalize all nouns) do not.<ref>Capitalization rules for days, months, demonyms and language-names in many languages from Meta-wiki</ref>
  • In English-language addresses, the noun following the proper name of a street is capitalized, whether or not it is abbreviated: Main Street, Fleming Ave., Montgomery Blvd. This capitalization is often absent in older citations and in combined usages: Fourth and Main streets. In French, street names are capitalized when they are proper names; the noun itself (Template:Lang, Template:Lang) is normally not capitalized: Template:Lang, Template:Lang.Template:Citation needed
  • In Italian the name of a particular concept or object is capitalized when the writer wants to emphasize its importance and significance.<ref>See the entry Template:Lang in the Italian Wikipedia for descriptions of various rules of capitalization in Italian and for references.</ref>
  • Capitalization is always used for most names of taxa used in scientific classification of living things, except for species-level taxa or below. Example: Homo sapiens sapiens.
  • Controversially, some authors capitalize common names of some animal and plant species. As a general rule, names are not capitalized, unless they are part of an official list of names, in which case they have become proper nouns and are capitalized. This is most common for birds<ref>Worldbirdnames.org Template:Webarchive</ref> and fishes. Names referring to more than one species (e.g., horse or cat) are always in lower case. Botanists generally do not capitalize the common names of plants, though individual words in plant names may be capitalized for another reason: (Italian stone pine). See the discussion of official common names under common name for an explanation.
  • Common nouns may be capitalized when used as names for the entire class of such things, e.g. what a piece of work is Man. Other Romance languages such as French often capitalize such nouns as Template:Lang (the state) and Template:Lang (the church) when not referring to specific ones.
  • Names by which gods are known are capitalized, including God, Athena, and Vishnu. The word god is generally not capitalized if it is used to refer to the generic idea of a deity, nor is it capitalized when it refers to multiple gods, e.g. Roman gods. There may be some confusion because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam rarely refer to the Deity by a specific name, but simply as God (see Writing divine names). Other names for the God of these three Abrahamic faiths, such as Elohim, Yahweh, and Lord, are also capitalized.
  • While acronyms have historically been written in all-caps, British, Finnish, Swedish and some German usage has moved towards capitalizing only the first letter in cases when these are pronounced as words (e.g. Unesco and Nato), reserving all-caps for initialisms (e.g. UK, USA, UNHCR).
  • In life stance orthography, in order to distinguish life stances from general -isms. For instance, Humanism is distinguished from humanism.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
  • In legal English, defined terms that refer to a specific entity, such as "Tenant" and "Lessor", are often capitalized. More specifically, in legal documents, terms which are formally defined elsewhere in the document or a related document (often in a schedule of definitions) are capitalized to indicate that that is the case, and may be several words long, e.g. "the Second Subsidiary Claimant", "the Agreed Conditional Release Date".
    • In contracts, particularly important clauses are often typeset as all-caps
  • Most English honorifics and titles of persons, e.g. Sir, Dr Watson, Mrs Jones, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. This does not apply where the words are not titles; e.g. Watson is a doctor, Philip is a duke.
  • In very formal British English the King is referred to as The King.
  • The governing body of English solicitors is correctly referred to as The Law Society. (In general any organisation may choose a name starting with a capitalized "The".)

Adjectives

Places and geographic terms

Template:More citations needed section The capitalization of geographic terms in English text generally depends on whether the author perceives the term as a proper noun, in which case it is capitalized, or as a combination of an established proper noun with a normal adjective or noun, in which case the latter are not capitalized. There are no universally agreed lists of English geographic terms which are considered as proper nouns. The following are examples of rules that someTemplate:Which British and U.S. publishers have established in style guides for their authors:

Upper case: East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Central America, North Korea, South Africa, the European Union, the Republic of Poland, the North Atlantic, the Middle East, the Arctic, The Gambia, The Bahamas, The Hague

Lower case: western China, southern Beijing, western Mongolia, eastern Africa, northern North Korea, the central Gobi, the lower Yangtze River.

Abbreviated

When a term is used as a name and then subsequently a shorter term is used, then that shorter term may be used generically. If that is the case do not capitalize. ("The Tatra National Park is a tourist destination in Poland. Watch out for bears when visiting the national park.")<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

By context

  • In all modern European languages, the first word in a sentence is capitalized, as is the first word in any quoted sentence. (For example, in English: Nana said, "There are ripe watermelons in the garden!")
    • The first word of a sentence is not capitalized in most modern editions of ancient Greek and, to a lesser extent, Latin texts. The distinction between lower and upper case was not introduced before the Middle Ages; in antiquity only the capital forms of letters were used.
    • For some items, many style guides recommend that initial capitalization be avoided by not putting the item at the beginning of a sentence, or by writing it in lowercase even at the beginning of a sentence. Such scientific terms have their own rules about capitalization which take precedence over the standard initial capitalization rule. For example, pH would be liable to cause confusion if written PH, and initial m and M may even have different meanings, milli and mega, for example 2 MA (megamperes) is a billion times 2 mA (milliamperes). Increasingly nowadays, some trademarks and company names start with a lowercase letter, and similar considerations apply.
    • When the first letters of a word have been omitted and replaced by an apostrophe, the first letter in a sentence is usually left uncapitalized in English and certain other languages, as "Template:Thin space'tis a shame ..." In Dutch, the second word is capitalized instead in this situation: "'t Was leuk" vs. "Het was leuk" (both meaning "It was fun").
  • Traditionally, the first words of a line of verse are capitalized in English, e.g.:
    Meanwhile, the winged Heralds, by command
    Of sovereign power, with awful ceremony
    And trumpet's sound, throughout the host proclaim
    A solemn council forthwith to be held
    At Pandemonium, the high capital
    Of Satan and his peers. [...]     (Milton, Paradise Lost I:752–756)
  • In the U.S., headlines and titles of works typically use title case, in which certain words (such as nouns, adjectives and verbs) are capitalized and others (such as prepositions and conjunctions) are not. In the U.K., titles of works use title case, but headlines generally use sentence case (or all caps in tabloid newspapers).

Capitalization styles

The following names are given to systems of capitalization:

Sentence case

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
The standard case used in English prose. Generally equivalent to the baseline universal standard of formal English orthography mentioned above; that is, only the first word is capitalized, except for proper nouns and other words which are generally capitalized by a more specific rule.

A variation is mid-sentence case which is identical to sentence case except that the first word is not capitalized (unless it would be capitalized by another rule). This type of letter case is used for entries in dictionaries.

Title case

Template:Main "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog."
Also known as headline case and capital case. All words capitalized, except for certain subsets defined by rules that are not universally standardized, often minor words such as "the" (as above), "of", or "and". Other commonly lowercase words are prepositions and coordinating conjunctions.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The standardization is only at the level of house styles and individual style manuals. (See Headings and publication titles.) A simplified variant is start case, where all words, including articles, prepositions, and conjunctions, start with a capital letter.

All caps

Template:Main Template:Not a typo
Also written as all-caps. Capital letters only. This style can be used for headlines and book or chapter titles at the top of a book page. It is commonly used in transcribed speech to indicate that a person is shouting, or to indicate a hectoring and obnoxious speaker.<ref name="All Caps, Butterick">Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web; Template:Cite news</ref> For this reason, it is generally discouraged. Long spans of Latin-alphabet text in all uppercase are harder to read because of the absence of the ascenders and descenders found in lowercase letters, which can aid recognition.<ref name="autogenerated62">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In professional documents, a commonly preferred alternative to all caps text is the use of small caps to emphasize key names or acronyms, or the use of italics or (more rarely) bold.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In addition, if all caps must be used, it is customary in headings of a few words to slightly widen the spacing between the letters, by around 10% of the point height. This practice is known as tracking or letterspacing.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Special cases

Compound names

Compound names are nouns that are made up of more than one stem, or a stem and one or more affixes.Template:Efn Names that are made up of several affixes and one or more nouns are not compound names under this definition, but noun phrases, that are made up of one or more separable affixes, and one or more nouns. Examples of the separable affixes may be found in List of family name affixes.Template:Efn Noun phrases are in this context treated as if they were nouns. So the general rule that nouns-as-names are capitalized in principle applies to compound names and noun-phrases-as-names as well. There are, however, exceptions to this rule that differ by language community.

  • In German, the separable affix, and at the same time preposition, Template:Lang (meaning "of", pronounced Template:IPA) or Template:Lang (meaning "named") in a surname (e.g. Template:Lang) is not capitalized (unless it is the first letter of a sentence). Von is however often dropped within a sentence. The same applies to similar Italian and Portuguese affixes.Template:Efn<ref name=CMOS314>Template:Cite book</ref>
  • In Dutch, the first affix, like Template:Lang; or Template:Lang, or declensions of de; or contractions of a preposition and an article, like ter; in a surname are capitalized unless a given name, initial, or other family name.Template:Efn precedes itTemplate:Efn Other affixes in the noun phrase (if present) are left lowercase.Template:Efn However, in Belgium the capitalization of a surname follows the orthography as used for the person's name in the Belgian population register and on his or her identification card., except when introducing a title of nobility or when use of the lower case has been granted to some noble family.<ref name=Taalunie1>Template:Cite web</ref> An exception for the rule that a Dutch name starts with an uppercase letter under all circumstances (including at the start of a sentence) is included in the general capitalization rule: "If the sentence begins with an apostrophe, the following full word is capitalized."Template:Efn This also applies to Dutch names that begin with a contraction that consists of an apostrophe and a letter.Template:Efn<ref name=Taalunie2>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • In English, practice varies when the name starts with a particleTemplate:Efn with a meaning such as "from" or "the" or "son of".
    • Some of these particles (Mac, Mc, M, O) are always capitalized; others (Template:Lang, Template:Lang) are usually capitalized; still others often are not (Template:Lang, Template:Lang, Template:Lang, Template:Lang). The compound particle Template:Lang is usually written with the L capitalized but not the d.<ref name="OMS">Oxford Manual of Style, R. M. Ritter ed., Oxford University Press, 2002</ref>Template:Efn
    • The remaining part of such a name, following the particle, is always capitalized if it is set off with a space as a separate word, or if the particle was not capitalized. It is normally capitalized if the particle is Mc, M, or O. In other cases (including Mac), there is no set rule (both Macintyre and MacIntyre are seen, for example).Template:Citation needed
  • Americans with non-Anglophone surnames often have not followed the orthographic conventions usual in the language communities of their extraction (or the US immigration authorities flouted the orthographic rules for them when they arrived at ports of entry like Ellis Island).Template:Efn As there are no universally accepted capitalization rules in these circumstances to serve as a guideline the best policy would seem to be to use the style that dominates for that person in reliable sources; for a living subject, prefer the spelling consistently used in the subject's own publications.<ref name=CMOS313>Template:Cite book</ref>

Titles

Template:See also

The Chicago Manual of Style recommends that the titles of English-language artistic works (plays, novels, essays, paintings, etc.) capitalize the first word and the last word in the title.<ref name="writersblock">Template:Cite web Archived.</ref> Additionally, most other words within a title are capitalized as well; articles and coordinating conjunctions are not capitalized.<ref name="writersblock" /> Sources disagree on the details of capitalizing prepositions.<ref name="writersblock" /> For example, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends rendering all prepositions in lowercase,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> whereas the APA style guide instructs: Capitalize major words in titles of books and articles within the body of the paper. Conjunctions, articles, and short prepositions are not considered major words; however, capitalize all words of four letters or more.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In other languages, such as the Romance languages, only the first word and proper names are capitalized.

Acronyms

Acronyms are usually capitalized, with a few exceptions:

"O"

  • The English addressive particle O, an archaic form of address, e.g. Thou, O king, art a king of kings, is usually capitalised. However, lowercase o is also occasionally seen in this context.

Accents

In most languages that use diacritics, these are treated the same way in uppercase whether the text is capitalized or all-uppercase. They may be always preserved (as in German) or always omitted (as in Greek) or often omitted (as in French).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Some attribute this to the fact that diacritics on capital letters were not available earlier on typewriters, and it is now becoming more common to preserve them in French and Spanish (in both languages the rule is to preserve them,<ref>Template:Lang</ref> although in France and Mexico, for instance, schoolchildren are often erroneously taught that they should not add diacritics on capital letters).

However, in the polytonic orthography used for Greek prior to 1982, accents were omitted in all-uppercase words, but kept as part of an uppercase initial (written before rather than above the letter). The latter situation is provided for by title-case characters in Unicode. When Greek is written with the present day monotonic orthography, where only the acute accent is used, the same rule is applied. The accent is omitted in all-uppercase words but it is kept as part of an uppercase initial (written before the letter rather than above it). The Template:Lang (diaeresis) should also always be used in all-uppercase words (even in cases where they are not needed when writing in lowercase, e.g. Template:Lang).

Digraphs and ligatures

Some languages treat certain digraphs as single letters for the purpose of collation. In general, where one such is formed as a ligature, the corresponding uppercase form is used in capitalization; where it is written as two separate characters, only the first will be capitalized. Thus Oedipus or Œdipus are both correct, but OEdipus is not. Examples with ligature include Template:Lang in Danish, where Æ/æ is a completely separate letter rather than merely a typographic ligature (the same applies in Icelandic); examples with separate characters are Template:Lang in Welsh, where Ll is a single letter; and Template:Lang in Welsh where Ff is equivalent to English F (whereas Welsh F corresponds to English V).<ref>Lewis, H (ed) Collins-Spurrell Welsh Dictionary Collins UK 1977 p. 10. Template:ISBN</ref> Presentation forms, however, can use doubled capitals, such as the logo of the National Library of Wales (Template:Lang). The position in Hungarian is similar to the latter.

  • An exception is the Dutch digraph IJ. Both letters are capitalized even though they are printed separately when using a computer, as in Template:Lang. In the past the digraph was written as Y, and this still survives in some surnames.
  • A converse exception exists in the Croatian alphabet, where digraph letters (Dž, Lj, Nj) have mixed-case forms even when written as ligatures.<ref>Vladimir Anić, Josip Silić: "Pravopisni priručnik hrvatskog ili srpskog jezika", Zagreb, 1986 (trans. Spelling handbook of Croato-Serbian language)</ref> With typewriters and computers, these "title-case" forms have become less common than 2-character equivalents; nevertheless they can be represented as single title-case characters in Unicode (Dž, Lj, Nj).
  • In Czech the digraph ch (usually considered as a single letter) can be capitalized in two ways: Ch or CH. In general only the first part is capitalized (Ch), unless the whole text is written in capital letters (then it is written CH). In acronyms both parts are usually capitalized, such as VŠCHT for Vysoká škola chemicko-technologická (University of Chemistry and Technology). However, the practice is not unified when writing initial letters of personal names (first name and surname), for example Jan Chudoba can be abbreviated both J. Ch. or J. CH.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Initial mutation

In languages where inflected forms of a word may have extra letters at the start, the capitalized letter may be the initial of the root form rather than the inflected form. For example, in Irish, in the placename Template:Lang, "(the) mountain of the women" (anglicized as Slievenamon), the word-form written Template:Lang contains the genitive plural of the noun Template:Lang, "woman", mutated after the genitive plural definite article (i.e., "of the"). The written B is mute in this form.

Other languages may capitalize the initial letter of the orthographic word, even if it is not present in the base, as with definite nouns in Maltese that start with certain consonant clusters. For example, Template:Lang (the United States) capitalize the epenthetic Template:Lang, even though the base form of the word — without the definite article — is Template:Lang.

Case-sensitive English words

In English, there are a few capitonyms, which are words whose meaning (and sometimes pronunciation) varies with capitalization. For example, the month August versus the adjective august. Or the verb polish versus the adjective Polish.

See also

Notes

Template:Notelist

References

Template:Reflist

Further reading

  • Council of Science Editors, Style Manual Committee. Scientific Style and format: the CSE manual for authors, editors, and publishers, 7th ed. Reston (VA): The Council; 2006. Section 9.7.3, P. 120.

Template:Wiktionary

Capitalization Rules

  1. Check Capitalization rules
  2. if you want convertcase in to Capitalization Rules then you can above rules.
  3. Definition of capitalization
  4. Validate Capitalization Rules in Spanish Capitalización Mayúsculas
  5. Online Capitalization Case Converter

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