Title case

To use title case correctly, you need to be able to distinguish between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ words, which isn't always easy. And style guides can differ in their classifications.

The ASG recommends the following steps, which are the simplest we’ve come across. Simply capitalise the first letter of:

1. the first word in the title, no matter what that word is
2. every noun, verb, adjective, adverb and pronoun
3. any other words with 4 or more letters.

These steps will usually leave the following types of words without capitals:

• articles (‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘an’)
• short conjunctions (such as ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘but’)
• short prepositions (such as ‘on’, ‘at’ and ‘in’).

If you are not confident in identifying different word classes (parts of speech), capitalise what seem to be the key words and the longer words and you will likely get it right.

If the title includes a hyphenated compound made from 2 major words, we also suggest capitalising the letter after the hyphen.

Use title case when you're giving a full title or name. But if you need to shorten that title or name to a more generic reference, use lower case. Use sentence case for any subtitle.

English also capitalises words for:

• countries (‘Australia‘)
• jurisdictions within countries (‘New South Wales‘)
• languages (‘English‘)
• months (‘November‘)
• days of the week (‘Tuesday’).

Most of these will only be one word, but some countries have a longer name that uses title case:

You can use title case to show defined terms in a legal document such as a contract. Put an initial capital on each major word of each term when it appears in the body text, and make sure you:

• define it in a glossary or definitions list
• don’t use it with a different or more general meaning.

You can use bolding instead of capitals if you only have a small number of terms.

Either way, consider how essential it is to highlight a defined term with extra formatting, as too many capitals or bolding becomes a distraction from the content itself.

The ASG recommends using sentence case rather than title case for headings in a text. This means that only the first word is capitalised, along with any proper nouns in the heading.

This approach is part of the move away from excess capitalisation to make text cleaner and easier to read. There is also less justification to use title case in a heading because it is not a title comparable to a publication or organisation.

See our Sentence case entry to learn more.