Title Case Converter
Title case per style guide: AP writes "With Care" and Chicago writes "with Care", and picking one silently is why titles drift.
The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog
What to Do if It All Goes Wrong
WORKING With NASA on the iPhone App
State-of-the-Art Caching for WordPress
Style AP style
Lines 4
Lines changed 4
AP's rule is about length: lowercase articles, conjunctions and
prepositions of three letters or fewer, capitalise everything else. So
"Over the Rainbow" and "With Care" keep their capitals, and APA works
the same way. Chicago would write both of those in lowercase.
Two rules every guide agrees on, both applied here: the first and last
words are always capitalised whatever they are, and so is the first word
after a colon. Those two catch most hand-written mistakes.
Words already in capitals are left alone, because they are acronyms:
"NASA" and "SQL" survive, and "Nasa" would not be an improvement. Brand
capitalisation such as iPhone and eBay survives for the same reason.
4 of 4 lines changed. Check the lines with a two-word verb in them: no
converter can tell a preposition from a particle, so "Log in" and "Log
In" are both defensible and only you know which you meant. Hyphenated
words are treated as separate words, which gives "State-of-the-Art"
rather than "State-Of-The-Art".
Output is valid and updates as you type.
Fix the highlighted fields to update the output.
There is no single correct title case. The guides disagree about the same word, and the disagreement is structural rather than arbitrary.
AP’s rule is about length: lowercase articles, conjunctions and prepositions of three letters or fewer, capitalise everything else. So AP writes “With Care” and “Over the Rainbow”.
Chicago’s rule is about part of speech: lowercase articles, the coordinating conjunctions, every preposition however long, and “as”. So Chicago writes “with Care” and “over the Rainbow”, and capitalises “If” and “When”, which are subordinating conjunctions rather than prepositions.
Both are right. A converter that implements one silently is the reason a site’s titles drift.
How to use
- Paste the titles, one per line.
- Pick the style your house guide follows. APA uses AP’s three-letter rule, so pick AP for it.
- Check the lines with a two-word verb in them, which is the one case no converter can decide for you.
Example
The same four titles in AP and in Chicago:
AP The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog
Chicago The Quick Brown Fox Jumps over the Lazy Dog
AP What to Do if It All Goes Wrong
Chicago What to Do If It All Goes Wrong
AP WORKING With NASA on the iPhone App
Chicago WORKING with NASA on the iPhone App
AP State-of-the-Art Caching for WordPress
Chicago State-of-the-Art Caching for WordPress“Over” and “with” are the visible difference: four letters, so AP capitalises and Chicago
does not. “If” goes the other way. And NASA and iPhone survive both, because a word
already carrying capitals is an acronym or a brand and “Nasa” is not an improvement.
Pitfalls
Two-word verbs are undecidable. In “log in to your account”, “in” is a particle belonging to the verb rather than a preposition, so “Log In” is defensible and “Log in” is what a length rule produces. No converter can tell them apart, and this one takes the mechanical answer. Check those lines.
Hyphens are treated as word boundaries. That gives “State-of-the-Art” rather than “State-Of-The-Art”, which matches Chicago and AP for a compound of minor words, and gives “Long-Term” where both parts are major. APA capitalises both parts of a hyphenated major word, which lands in the same place for most real titles.
The first and last words are always capitalised. Every guide agrees, and so does this, whatever the word is. “The End of The” looks odd and is correct.
So is the first word after a colon. Also universal, and the rule people most often miss by hand.
An abbreviation’s full stop is not a sentence end. “U.S. sales” keeps the lowercase “sales” in sentence case, because the stop belongs to the abbreviation. A converter that capitalises after every dot produces “U.S. Sales” in the middle of a sentence.
Sentence case is not lowercase. It capitalises the first word and leaves proper nouns, acronyms and brands alone. It is what the Guardian, the BBC and Microsoft now use for headings, and the argument for it is that a capitalised proper noun actually stands out.
Start case is not a style guide. Capitalising every word, including “Of” and “The”, is common in software and asked for by nobody. It is offered here because you may have to match an existing interface.
Compatibility
Everything runs in the browser: nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.
Words are matched with Unicode property escapes, so accented and non-Latin titles are
handled rather than mangled: Å, ß and Ω are letters here. The punctuation between
words is preserved exactly, so the line comes back with its own spacing and dashes intact.
The word lists are the ones the guides publish: three articles, seven coordinating conjunctions, the short prepositions plus “as”, and thirty-odd prepositions of four letters or more. Chicago’s list is longer because its rule catches every preposition; AP’s is shorter because its rule is a length test.
What is not implemented, deliberately: a dictionary. Deciding whether “down” is a preposition or an adverb in your title needs to know what the title means, and a tool that guessed would be wrong invisibly rather than wrong predictably.