What is Title Case?
Title case is a capitalization style for titles, headlines, headings, and proper names. The first letter of each major word is capitalized, while small words like articles, conjunctions, and short prepositions stay lowercase. The exact list of "small" words depends on the style guide you follow.
Eight major style guides have their own title-case rules. Most converters bundle these into a single "Title Case" button — Transform Case lets you pick the exact style and shows you which rule fired for every word.
When to use Title Case
- Headlines and article titles — newspapers, magazines, blog posts. AP for journalism, Chicago for books, APA for academic papers.
- Book and movie titles — Chicago is the publishing default.
- Section headings in formal documents.
- Email subject lines — though sentence case is also acceptable.
- Social media post titles — LinkedIn articles, Medium pieces.
- Course names, presentation titles, slide deck headings.
How Title Case conversion works
- The first and last words of the title are always capitalized, regardless of what they are.
- Major words — nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns — are capitalized.
- Minor words — articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or), and short prepositions — stay lowercase. The cutoff for "short" varies by style: AP and NY Times use 3 letters, APA uses 3 with words 4+ always capitalized, Chicago and MLA lowercase all prepositions regardless of length.
- Words after a colon are capitalized in most styles.
- Hyphenated compounds: each major part is capitalized.
- Proper nouns retain their canonical form (iPhone, GraphQL, NASA).
Worked examples
| Input | Title Case |
|---|---|
the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog |
The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog (AP) |
with great power comes great responsibility |
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility (APA) |
the way through the woods |
The Way through the Woods (Chicago) |
on writing well: a guide for non-fiction |
On Writing Well: A Guide for Non-Fiction (AP) |
Related case formats
Sentence case
→ Convert text to Sentence case
Capitalized Case→ Convert text to Capitalized Case
UPPERCASE→ Convert text to UPPERCASE
Need more conversion options?
Open the full converter →