Title Case: How to Capitalize Words in Titles

If you're confused about which words in a heading to capitalize, here's a handy guide.

The most widespread rule is to capitalize all words except articles, prepositions and conjunctions.

Articles are "a," "an" and "the." Prepositions are words that begin prepositional phrases (eg, "on the mat"), such as "on," "in," "out," "to," "from," "for," "of" and "with." Conjunctions link words, sentences, phrases or clauses together, such as "and," "or" and "but."

A common mistake is to assume that all "short" (hazily defined) words are to be in lower case, which leads to words such as "is" and "it" being lower case. This is not the generally accepted style. In title case, all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives are capitalized.

So, according to these rules, "the cat sat on the mat" in title case would be "The Cat Sat on the Mat."

A final rule is that the last word in a title is always capitalized. So in the film title "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," for instance, "Off" is capitalized, despite being a preposition.

As with all language rules, there are variations. In journalism and writing, different publishers have different standards, which they try to keep consistent across all publications ("house style"). Some newspapers, for example, prefer to write headlines in sentence case, ie, with only the first word and proper nouns capitalized. Becoming more frequent is the practice of putting every word in a title in capitals. This is most common on commercial websites.

The tradition remains the standard, however: In a title, capitalize all words except articles, prepositions and conjunctions.