Title Case Converter

How to use the title case converter

1. Type or paste your titles into Your titles (one per line), or click Example to load five sample titles.
2. Choose a Style guide: AP (news), APA 7th (academic), Chicago 18th (books), MLA 9th (humanities) or Capitalize every word. APA is selected by default.
3. Leave Keep acronyms and brand names (NASA, iPhone) ticked unless you want those words recapitalized too.
4. The result updates as you type. Check the table The first title in each style to see how the four guides differ for your first title.
5. Click Copy, Download .txt, or continue to sentence case or the slug generator with the same text.

What each style lowercases

All styles capitalize the first and last word of a title, the word before a colon, question mark or exclamation mark (it ends the title or main title), and the first word after a colon, em dash, question mark, exclamation mark or period. They differ only in which small words stay lowercase in the middle:

The rules come from the guides themselves. APA capitalizes “words of four letters or more” and gives “With” as an example. The AP Stylebook capitalizes “prepositions and conjunctions of four or more letters”. Chicago’s 18th edition (2024) changed its rule so that “prepositions of more than four letters are capitalized”; earlier editions lowercased every preposition. MLA lowercases a preposition “no matter how long” it is. The title case rules guide goes through each guide in more detail.

Worked examples

These are the tool’s actual results:

Long prepositions split Chicago from MLA:

With Capitalize every word, a tale of two cities becomes A Tale Of Two Cities. That suits some product listings and YouTube titles, but no style guide asks for it. For that job on its own, the capitalize words tool has more options.

How the converter decides

• Each line is one title. Leading spaces, trailing spaces and empty lines are kept. one title, an empty line and third one become One Title, an empty line and Third One.
• Words are separated by spaces. Punctuation stuck to a word is ignored when the tool checks the word list, so "the end" of the story becomes "The End" of the Story, and don't stop believing becomes Don't Stop Believing.
• Hyphenated words get a capital after each hyphen unless the part after the hyphen is a minor word, in every style: a step-by-step guide to the up-to-date method becomes A Step-by-Step Guide to the Up-to-Date Method. APA gives Self-Report as its example.
• Acronyms and brand names with unusual capitals (NASA, iPhone, eBay, YouTube, McDonald) are left as typed when the option is on, and so are web addresses and email addresses: visit www.example.com for more becomes Visit www.example.com for More. With the option off, iPhone becomes Iphone.
• Text in all capitals is treated as shouting, not acronyms. THE GREAT GATSBY becomes The Great Gatsby, so you don’t need to lowercase it first, and a shouted run inside a normal title is fixed too: the GREAT GATSBY returns becomes The Great Gatsby Returns. Short acronyms next to each other stay as typed: the FBI CIA files becomes The FBI CIA Files. The downside is that in a title typed entirely in capitals, NASA AND THE MOON becomes Nasa and the Moon. Fix those by hand.
• Numbers are not words to capitalize: 10 ways to save money becomes 10 Ways to Save Money. Letters after a leading digit stay lowercase, so self-help for the over-40s becomes Self-Help for the Over-40s.
• Colons, question marks and em dashes split a title in two, so the words on both sides are capitalized: what is it for: a guide to self-report surveys becomes What Is It For: A Guide to Self-Report Surveys, and wait—what happened next becomes Wait—What Happened Next (with or without spaces around the dash).
• Abbreviations with periods written in capitals are always kept, even with the acronym option off or in all-caps input: the U.S. economy in 2026 becomes The U.S. Economy in 2026.
• Roman numerals from II to XXXIX are written in capitals in every style: world war ii becomes World War II, and so does Capitalize every word. XI is the exception: it is also a name, so chapter xi becomes Chapter Xi.

Limits worth checking by hand

The tool works from word lists, not grammar, so a few cases need a second look:

• Phrasal verbs. In turn off the lights, off is part of the verb, and the style guides capitalize it (Chicago’s Q&A explains this for up in “dress up”). The tool sees a short preposition and gives Turn off the Lights. Change it to Off yourself.
• Proper nouns in lowercase. A name typed as python is capitalized as Python because it is not a minor word. A name that happens to be a minor word cannot be recognized.

Title case or sentence case?

Title case is the usual choice for book, film and song titles, news headlines (AP) and headings in APA papers. Sentence case capitalizes only the first word and proper nouns. APA uses it for article and book titles in reference lists, and many websites use it for headings because it reads like ordinary text. If your guide calls for sentence case, use the sentence case converter. The guide title case vs sentence case compares the two with examples.

For SEO titles and social posts, capitalize the headline first, then check its length with the character counter, since search results and platforms cut long titles short.

Questions