Title Case Converter

What a title case converter does

Title case is the capitalization used for headlines and titles — most words start with a capital, but short joining words such as and, of and the stay lowercase. The catch is that the major style guides disagree about which words those are, and about when a short word should be capitalized anyway. This tool applies the rules of the guide you choose and shows you its small-word list so nothing is hidden.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your title. Entering it in lowercase gives the cleanest result.
2. Pick the style guide you are writing for.
3. Read the converted title and copy it.
4. Check the list of lowercase words below to understand why a particular word was left uncapitalized.

Because complex titles involve editorial judgment, treat the output as a careful first pass and review names, brands and unusual terms yourself.

How the styles differ

Every style capitalizes the first and last word of a title no matter what, and capitalizes all the "major" words — nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns. The differences are in the "minor" words:

• General English keeps common articles, coordinating conjunctions and short prepositions (a, an, the, and, but, or, of, to, in) lowercase. A practical default when no specific guide is required.
• APA capitalizes any word of four letters or more, including prepositions like with and from. Short conjunctions and prepositions of three letters or fewer stay lowercase.
• AP is similar to APA in capitalizing words of four letters or more, and is the standard for news and journalism.
• Chicago lowercases all prepositions regardless of length, along with articles and coordinating conjunctions, which is why a long preposition such as between stays lowercase.
• MLA lowercases articles, coordinating conjunctions and prepositions of any length, close to Chicago.

The tool also handles a few special cases across all styles: the word after a colon is capitalized (subtitles begin with a capital), hyphenated compounds have each part considered separately, and words already written in all capitals are treated as acronyms and left alone. The full minor-word list for each style is kept in a dedicated data structure, shown in the panel above, so it is easy to audit and update.

What no automatic tool can do is resolve genuine ambiguity — whether a word is a preposition or an adverb in context, or whether a brand name breaks the rules on purpose. Those are the cases to review by hand.

Examples

The styles agree here because every minor word is short. They diverge on longer prepositions: a journey through the mountains becomes A Journey Through the Mountains in APA and AP (through is capitalized as a four-plus-letter word) but A Journey through the Mountains in Chicago and MLA (prepositions stay lowercase regardless of length).

Common use cases

• Academic writing. Format paper titles and reference entries in APA or MLA.
• Journalism. Apply AP style to headlines and article titles.
• Book and chapter titles in Chicago style for publishing.
• Blog headlines where a consistent, clean title case improves the look of a site.
• Presentation slide titles that need to look deliberate rather than sentence-cased.

Privacy and security

Titles are converted in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, so working titles for unannounced projects stay private.

Your chosen style is remembered locally. See the privacy policy for the details.