Title Case Converter

What this title capitalization tool does

Paste a headline, a chapter name, a paper title or a whole list of them, and this tool rewrites the capitalization to match the style guide you pick. There is no run button: the result re-forms as you type, and switching between the nine styles or the seven letter cases reformats it instantly.

It is a rules engine, not a guess. Each style is encoded as the set of decisions its manual actually specifies — which word classes are "minor", how many letters a preposition may have before it gets a capital, whether the final word is force-capitalized, what happens either side of a hyphen — and the same word-by-word walk applies them. Run the same title twice and you get the same answer twice.

Title case vs sentence case

Title case capitalizes the important words and leaves the connecting words small: The Elements of Style. It is what book covers, article headlines, section headings and reference lists use.

Sentence case capitalizes only the first word (plus proper nouns): The elements of style. Most modern software documentation, many newspapers outside the US and APA's own reference-list entries prefer it, because it is faster to read and impossible to get subtly wrong.

Both are one click apart here, along with UPPERCASE, lowercase, First Letter Case, alternating case and toggle case.

What to capitalize in a title

Every style in this tool agrees on the backbone:

• Capitalize the first word. Always, even if it is a, an or the.
• Capitalize the major words — nouns, pronouns, verbs (including short ones like Is and Are), adjectives, adverbs and subordinating conjunctions.
• Lowercase the minor words in the middle — articles, coordinating conjunctions and the shorter prepositions.
• Capitalize the word after a colon, because a subtitle starts a new title.

The disagreements are all about the edges: how short is "short", whether the last word gets special treatment, and what a hyphen does. That is exactly what the style tabs switch between.

Why the style you pick changes the answer

Take the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The word over is four letters — the precise length the guides split on:

• APA, AP, AMA and the NY Times give you Jumps Over the Lazy Dog.
• Chicago, MLA, Bluebook and Wikipedia give you Jumps over the Lazy Dog.

Or take what to look for. APA, AP, Chicago, MLA, NY Times and Wikipedia capitalize the final word on principle: What to Look For. Bluebook and AMA have no last-word rule at all, so they leave it: What to Look for.

Neither answer is a bug. They are different manuals.

The nine styles, and what makes each different

APA (7th edition) — the academic default in psychology and the social sciences. Anything four letters or longer is a major word, so Between, Through and About are capitalized while of, in and the are not. In a hyphenated compound built on a prefix that cannot stand alone, the second half stays lowercase: Anti-inflammatory.

Chicago (18th edition) — books and long-form publishing. The 18th edition moved to a four-letter threshold for prepositions, so with, from and over stay down but Under and Between go up. Chicago also lowercases only five of the seven coordinating conjunctions — for, and, nor, but, or — and capitalizes Yet and So.

AP — the newsroom standard, and the one most marketing teams inherit. Same four-letter rule as APA, applied bluntly: With, From, Into and After are all capitalized. Both halves of a hyphenated compound get capitals.

MLA (9th edition) — humanities papers and Works Cited lists. MLA ignores length entirely: every preposition is lowercase, however long, so you get Between, Through and Notwithstanding all sitting in lowercase mid-title unless they open or close it.

Bluebook — legal citation. Lowercases articles, coordinating conjunctions and prepositions of four letters or fewer, capitalizes the word after a colon, and — unlike most guides — has no rule forcing a capital on the last word.

AMA (11th edition) — medical and scientific journals. A three-letter threshold, like APA, but it shares Bluebook's lack of a last-word rule, so a title ending in a preposition keeps it lowercase.

NY Times — headline style, and the odd one out. It uses a fixed list of small words rather than a length test, which is why At, By and In stay lowercase while the identically short Up, Off and Out are capitalized.

Wikipedia — MOS:TITLECAPS, for article titles and section headings. Lowercases articles, coordinating conjunctions, prepositions of four letters or fewer, and the to of an infinitive. First and last words always take a capital.

Email — our own lightest preset, not a published manual. Every minor word is lowercased whatever its length and there is no last-word rule, which reads cleanly in a crowded inbox where a subject line is scanned rather than read.

Bulk mode

Switch the input to Bulk list and each line is treated as its own title: the first and last word rules restart on every row, and blank lines are preserved. Paste a spreadsheet column of product names, a content calendar, or a set of chapter headings, and copy or download the whole capitalized list at once.

Custom dictionary

Some words are spelled the way they are on purpose. Add them to the custom dictionary — one per line — and they come out exactly as you typed them, whatever the style guide would otherwise do: iOS, eBay, macOS, JavaScript, a brand name, an internal acronym. The list is saved in your browser and nowhere else.

Even with an empty dictionary, the tool leaves deliberate capitalization alone: a word carrying a capital anywhere but its first letter — NASA, PDF, iPhone, McKinsey — is passed through untouched. The exception is a line typed entirely in capitals, which is treated as shouting and re-cased normally.

Frequently asked questions

Which title case style should I use?

Follow whatever your publication, professor or house style guide requires — that decision is made for you far more often than not. With a genuinely free choice: AP for marketing copy, blog headlines and press releases; Chicago for books and long-form editorial; APA for social-science coursework; MLA for humanities papers; AMA for medical writing; Bluebook for legal documents.

Is "to" capitalized in a title?

Not in any of these nine styles. It is lowercase both as the infinitive marker in How to Win Friends and as a two-letter preposition — unless it happens to be the first word, or the last word in a style that force-capitalizes the last word.

How are hyphenated words handled?

Each element of the compound is judged separately, so State-of-the-Art keeps its small words small. APA and MLA additionally lowercase the element after a prefix that cannot stand alone as a word (Anti-inflammatory); AP, Chicago and the rest capitalize both halves (Anti-Inflammatory).

What do the quotation mark options do?

Straight converts typographic quotes and apostrophes to the ASCII " and ' — useful when the text is heading into code, a CSV or a system that mangles Unicode. Curly does the reverse, choosing opening and closing forms from context, which is what you want for print and for anything that will be typeset.

Does anything I type get uploaded?

No. The rules engine runs in your browser, so titles, lists and your custom dictionary never leave the tab. There is no account, no sign-up and no request to a server.