Capitalisation

Capitalisation is the orthographical convention of rendering the first letter of a word otherwise in lowercase as uppercase.

Overview

Capitalisation conventions in English are complicated and have evolved over time.

Colloquially, the verb to cap or to cap up can be used.

Capitalisation applies to the letter cases of sentence case and title case. All caps doesn’t have capitalisation because everything is capitals by default. All lower case doesn’t have capitalisation either for the opposite reason.

Rules

Sentence case

Typically, in sentence case, the following are capitalised:

• The first letter of a sentence.
• Proper nouns and proper adjectives.
• The first person singular subject pronoun, I.

Title case

In title case, the following are always capitalised:

• The first letter of the title.
• The first person singular subject pronoun, I.
• All other words except for short grammar words, i.e. grammatical articles (a, an, the), short prepositions (e.g. of, at, etc) and the infinitive particle (to).

Note that prepositions at the start of the title are capitalised due to the first rule, e.g. Of Mice and Men. Longer prepositions are often capitalised, and the actual usage can be somewhat inconsistent. Consult a style guide if unsure.

Pedagogy

It’s quite common for primary age kids, native or non-native speakers, to forget to capitalise words that should be capitalised, especially at the start of a sentence, or proper nouns.

EFL learners may over-capitalise or under-capitalise based on L1 transfer. For example, in French, days of the week and months of the year are not capitalised (lundi, mardi, mercredi, etc and janvier, fevrier, mars etc), so a French EFL learner may write *monday, *tuesday, *wednesday, or *january *february *march, etc. Conversely, in German, all nouns are capitalised (e.g. Die Maus ist im Feld (meaning The mouse is in the field)), so a German EFL learner may write *The Mouse is in the Field.