How to use the title case converter
- Paste your text. One title per line: a single headline, a list of blog post titles, a table of contents or a set of slide headings. Each line is converted on its own.
- Compare the styles. The four versions update as you type. Highlighted words are the ones AP, Chicago and APA treat differently, usually a preposition of four letters or more, or a short word at the end of the title.
- Copy the one you need. Each style has its own Copy button. The copied text is plain, with one title per line, ready for a CMS, a document or a spreadsheet.
If your organization has a house style, use it. If not, AP is the usual choice for websites, blogs and press releases in the US, Chicago for books and long-form publishing, and APA for academic and research writing.
AP, Chicago and APA title case compared
All three styles capitalize the first word, nouns, pronouns, verbs (including short ones like Is and Be), adjectives and adverbs. They differ on the small words:
| Word type | AP | Chicago | APA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Articles: a, an, the | Lowercase | Lowercase | Lowercase |
| Prepositions of 3 letters or fewer: at, by, in, of, on, to | Lowercase | Lowercase | Lowercase |
| Prepositions of 4 letters or more: about, from, into, with, through | Capitalize | Lowercase | Capitalize |
| Coordinating conjunctions: and, but, for, or, nor | Lowercase | Lowercase | Lowercase |
| Short conjunctions so, yet, if, as | Lowercase | Capitalize (as is lowercase) | Lowercase |
| Last word of the title | Always capitalized | Always capitalized | Follows the same rules as the rest |
| First word after a colon | Capitalize | Capitalize | Capitalize |
So “Working Through a Busy Week” in AP and APA becomes “Working through a Busy Week” in Chicago, and “The Story We Keep Coming Back To” in AP and Chicago ends with a lowercase “to” in APA.
Title case or sentence case for headlines
Title case looks formal and makes each word stand out, which suits book titles, report covers and short headlines. Sentence case reads like a normal sentence: only the first word and proper names get capitals. It is faster to read in long headings, easier to apply consistently across a team, and it is what many digital products, news sites and design systems use for headings, buttons and menus.
Whichever you choose, use one style for each kind of heading across the whole website. Mixed capitalization in a menu, a list of articles or a set of buttons is one of the quickest signs that nobody edited the site.
Sentence case cannot tell a name from an ordinary word: London, Google and Monday all come out lowercase if they were typed with only an initial capital. Words in capitals, such as SEO, and words with a capital inside, such as iPhone, are kept. Check the names after converting.
What the converter cannot know
Capitalization rules depend on how a word is used, and a converter only sees the word. A few cases to check by hand:
- Phrasal verbs. In “How to Set Up a Shop”, up is part of the verb and is capitalized in all three styles. The converter treats up, in, on, off and out as prepositions and lowercases them, so capitalize them again in phrasal verbs such as Set Up, Log In or Sign Out.
- Words that change role. “Like”, “before”, “after” and “since” can be prepositions, conjunctions or verbs. The converter capitalizes them, which is right for most headlines.
- Brand names. Names like eBay or iPhone are kept as typed. A brand written in all lowercase, such as a product name styled that way, is capitalized like any other word.
- Text in capitals. A line typed entirely in capitals is lowercased before converting, so acronyms in it lose their capitals too.
Methodology and limits
- Words
- Each line is split on spaces. Punctuation around a word, such as quotes and commas, is kept and ignored for the rules. In a hyphenated word the first part is always capitalized, and later parts are lowercased only when they are an article, a coordinating conjunction or one of the prepositions to, of, in, on, at, by and as that the style lowercases, so up-to-date becomes Up-to-Date and follow-up becomes Follow-Up.
- AP
- Lowercase: a, an, the, and the conjunctions and prepositions of three letters or fewer (and, as, but, for, if, nor, or, so, yet, at, by, in, of, off, on, out, per, to, up, via, vs). Capitalized when first, last, or after a colon, a dash, a question mark or an exclamation mark.
- Chicago
- Lowercase: a, an, the, the coordinating conjunctions and, but, for, or, nor, the words to and as, and prepositions of any length from a fixed list of about 45 (about, across, between, from, into, through, with, without and others). Capitalized when first, last, or after a colon, a dash, a question mark or an exclamation mark.
- APA
- The same lowercase list as AP, with no last-word rule: capitalized when first or after a colon, dash, question mark or exclamation mark.
- Sentence case
- Every word is lowercased except the first word, the first word after a colon, a question mark, an exclamation mark or a period, the word I and its contractions, and words that contain a capital after the first letter (SEO, iPhone, McDonald).
- Kept as typed
- Words with a capital after the first letter, web addresses and email addresses, in every style.
Sources
- AP Stylebook, The Associated Press, entry on composition titles
- The Chicago Manual of Style, University of Chicago Press, chapter 8 on headline-style capitalization
- Title case capitalization, APA Style, American Psychological Association
- Sentence case capitalization, APA Style, American Psychological Association