Which Words Do You Capitalize in a Title?

You are writing a title. You get to a small word — is, to, with, our — and you stop. Big word, capital. Small word, lowercase. That is the rule everyone half-remembers, and it is wrong often enough to be useless.

Length is not the rule. Part of speech is. Is has two letters and gets a capital. Between has seven and, in half the style guides, does not.

The short answer, by word

These are the words people actually stop on. The two columns are the two camps English style guides fall into, which I explain below the table.

Every row in the top half is identical across all four guides, which is the useful part: for verbs, pronouns and articles there is no argument to have. The disagreement is confined to one thing — prepositions of four letters or more.

Why “is” catches almost everyone

Is is the single most searched word in this whole question, and the reason is a broken rule of thumb.

People remember “lowercase the short words.” Is is two letters, so down it goes. But the short-word rule was never about all short words. It applies to articles, coordinating conjunctions and short prepositions — the grammatical glue. Is is none of those. It is a verb, and every major style guide capitalises verbs regardless of how short they are.

So it is What Is a Title?, never What is a Title?

The same trap catches are, be, am, was and do. All short. All verbs. All capitalised.

The two camps

Once you get past verbs and articles, the guides split into two approaches, and knowing which one you are in answers every remaining question.

Chicago treats every preposition as a minor word — through, between, without, against all stay lowercase unless they open or close the title. AP and APA count letters instead, so anything four letters or longer gets a capital.

This is why you have seen that film title written both ways and assumed one was a typo. Neither is. Gone with the Wind is Chicago. Gone With the Wind is AP.

The first and last word beat every other rule

Whatever the table says, the first word of a title is capitalised, and so is the last. No exceptions, in any of the four guides.

Subtitles get the same treatment. The word straight after a colon starts a new clause, so it is capitalised even if it is the or a.

Hyphenated words

Capitalise the first part always. Whether the second part gets a capital depends on the guide, and this is the one place I would tell you not to agonise.

• Chicago: capitalise both parts — Self-Portrait, Twentieth-Century — unless the second is an article, preposition or conjunction.
• AP: capitalise both parts of a compound in a headline.
• Prefixes: after re-, pre-, co- and similar, the second part stays lowercase when it is not a standalone word — Re-election, not Re-Election.

When you have no house style

Most people asking this question are not writing for a journal. They are writing a blog post, a page heading or a product name, and nobody is going to audit it.

Pick one and be consistent. Consistency across your own site is worth more than picking the “right” guide, because inconsistency is the thing a reader actually notices. If you want a default: AP is the safer bet for anything on the web, because it matches how most headlines you have read are written.

Do it automatically

Our Case Converter has a Title Case mode that applies these rules rather than capitalising every word. That distinction matters more than it sounds — most converters, and Excel’s PROPER() function, give you The Lord Of The Rings, which is not title case. It is every word capitalised.

It runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded.

Two other things worth knowing when you are working on titles. Search engines truncate by pixel width rather than character count, so a title full of capitals is cut off sooner than a lowercase one of the same length — our Word Counter gives you the character count to work against. And if your title was copied out of a PDF, a CMS or a design tool, it may carry invisible characters that survive a case change; the Invisible Character Detector will name them, and the Text Cleaner will strip them.