Capitalization

• 1. Introduction

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  Capitalization shapes every sentence you read, every headline you scan, and every contract you sign. It is the practice of writing a word with its first letter as an uppercase letter and the remaining letters in lowercase. That sounds simple enough. But the full rules of capitalization in English are complicated and have changed over time, generally moving toward capitalizing fewer words. A modern reader picking up an 18th-century English document would find it oddly formal, because many common nouns were routinely capitalized then. What forces drove those changes? Why does German still capitalize every noun while English long ago abandoned the practice? And why does the same letter, in the same language, sometimes carry entirely different meaning depending on whether it is upper or lower case? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. A History of Fewer Capitals

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  In antiquity, written Greek and Latin used only capital letter forms. The distinction between lowercase and uppercase was not introduced until the Middle Ages, which means that for most of recorded ancient history, the concept of mixed case simply did not exist. Most modern editions of ancient Greek texts do not capitalize the first word of a sentence, preserving something of that older tradition.

  By the 17th and 18th centuries, English writers were capitalizing many common nouns, a habit visible in most of the original 1787 United States Constitution and in Gulliver's Travels. The same trend ran through other Germanic languages. Danish capitalized all nouns before the spelling reform of 1948. Norwegian abandoned the practice before the spelling reform of 1901. Swedish maintained it through the 17th and 18th centuries.

  Today, only the High German language family, including Standard German and Luxembourgish, still requires that all nouns be capitalized using the Latin alphabet. English moved steadily in the opposite direction, and the modern result is a system where capitalization signals a narrower set of distinctions: the start of a sentence, proper names, and a handful of special categories.

• 3. Pronouns and Reverence

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  English singles out exactly one pronoun for permanent capitalization: the subjective first-person singular, I. Its contractions, such as I'll and I'm, follow the same rule. The objective and possessive forms, me, my, and mine, do not.

  Religious tradition supplies a parallel set of conventions. Many European languages have historically capitalized nouns and pronouns referring to God, including references to Jesus Christ, a practice called the use of reverential capitals. Phrases such as hallowed be Thy name reflect this. Some English authors extend the practice to any word that refers to God, capitalizing terms like the Lamb and the Almighty. These conventions have become much less common in English during the 20th and 21st centuries.

  In Baháʼí literature, singular and plural object, subject, and possessive forms are all capitalized when they refer to a Rasul, the Twelve Imams, or 'Abdu'l-Baha. Eastern Slavic languages offer yet another angle: some speakers associate capitalization with respect and deliberately decapitalize proper nouns as a way of expressing disrespect toward the person or entity named.

  German adds one further layer. The formal second-person plural pronoun Sie is capitalized in German, along with all its case forms, including Ihre and Ihres. Until recent spelling reforms, the informal pronoun Du and its derivatives were also capitalized in letters, though that rule is no longer required. The formal-informal distinction in 2nd-person pronouns appears across dozens of languages, from Spanish's abbreviated forms Ud. and Vds. to Finnish's Te to Russian's Вы in personal correspondence, each with its own capitalization rule.

• 4. Names, Brands, and Exceptions

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  In nearly all European languages, single-word proper nouns, including personal names, are capitalized. Multi-word proper nouns generally follow the traditional English rules for publication titles, as in Robert the Bruce. Place names that are merely preceded by a definite article usually keep that article in lowercase, as in the Philippines. When the article is integral to the name, it is capitalized, as in Den Haag and Le Havre.

  A curious footnote: a few English surnames are written with two lowercase f's, as in ffrench and ffoulkes. That convention originated as a variant script form for capital F, meaning that what looks like a lowercase opening is actually a historical relic of uppercase.

  Some individuals have chosen not to use capitals in their names at all. K.d. lang and bell hooks are widely cited examples. E. E. Cummings, whose name is often printed without capitals, did not actually use that style himself; the convention derived from the typography on the cover of one of his books, and it has followed him ever since.

  Most brand names and trademarks are capitalized, as with Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but some have deliberately broken the rule to stand out. EasyJet, id Software, eBay, and iPod all violate standard capitalization conventions. When capital letters appear within a word, the practice is sometimes called camel case.

  Acronyms have historically been written in all capitals. British, Finnish, Swedish, and some German usage has gradually shifted toward capitalizing only the first letter when an acronym is pronounced as a word, such as Unesco and Nato, while reserving all capitals for initialisms like UK, USA, and UNHCR.

• 5. Style Systems and Their Rules

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  The Chicago Manual of Style recommends that titles of English-language artistic works, including plays, novels, essays, and paintings, capitalize the first word, the last word, and most other words, with articles and coordinating conjunctions left lowercase. Prepositions are a point of disagreement: Chicago recommends rendering all prepositions lowercase, while the APA style guide capitalizes any word of four letters or more.

  In contrast, Romance languages such as French capitalize only the first word and proper names in titles. In the U.S., headlines and titles typically use title case. In the U.K., news headlines generally use sentence case, or all capitals in tabloid newspapers.

  The names for these systems are themselves a small catalog of conventions. Sentence case capitalizes only the first word of a sentence and any proper nouns. Title case capitalizes most words. All caps uses capitals exclusively, but long spans of Latin-alphabet text written in all uppercase are harder to read, because the ascenders and descenders present in lowercase letters help readers recognize word shapes. A preferred alternative in professional documents is small caps for key names or acronyms, sometimes combined with slightly widened letter spacing, a practice known as tracking or letterspacing.

  Legal English adds another layer. Defined terms that refer to a specific entity, such as Tenant or Lessor, are often capitalized to signal that the term has been formally defined elsewhere in the document or in a related schedule of definitions. Particularly important clauses are often typeset in all capitals.

• 6. Digraphs, Diacritics, and Edge Cases

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  Some languages treat certain digraphs as single letters for the purpose of alphabetical ordering, and capitalization follows from that treatment. Welsh treats Ll as a single letter, so the place name Llanelli capitalizes only the first of the two letters. Welsh Ff is a single letter equivalent to English F, giving Ffrangeg a double-capital opening that can look like an error to English eyes. The presentation forms used in the National Library of Wales logo, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, use doubled capitals as a deliberate typographic choice.

  Dutch breaks the pattern with the digraph IJ. Both letters are capitalized even when printed separately, producing forms like IJsselmeer. Historically the digraph was written as Y, and that survives in some Dutch surnames today.

  Croatian goes in yet another direction. Its digraph letters, Dž, Lj, and Nj, have mixed-case forms even when written as ligatures. With typewriters and computers, these title-case forms have become less common than two-character equivalents, but they can still be represented as single title-case characters in Unicode.

  Diacritics present their own complications. In most languages that use accent marks, these are treated the same way whether a letter is capitalized or all-uppercase. French and Spanish have rules requiring diacritics to be preserved on capital letters, but in France and Mexico, schoolchildren are often taught incorrectly that they should omit diacritics on capitals. That teaching traces back to the practical limits of older typewriters, which often could not produce accented capital letters. Greek prior to 1982 used polytonic orthography, in which accents were omitted in all-uppercase words but kept as part of an uppercase initial, written before rather than above the letter.

• 7. Words That Change With Case

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  English has a small category of words called capitonyms, where meaning and sometimes pronunciation shift depending on whether the word is capitalized. August as a month and august as an adjective meaning dignified or imposing are one example. Polish as a verb and Polish as an adjective referring to the nation are another.

  Scientific notation creates its own case sensitivity. The unit prefix milli is written as a lowercase m, while mega is written as uppercase M. The difference is not stylistic: 2 MA, megamperes, is a billion times larger than 2 mA, milliamperes. For that reason, some style guides recommend avoiding scientific terms like pH at the start of a sentence, since capitalizing them to PH would cause confusion.

  The capitalization of geographic terms in English depends largely on whether the writer treats the term as a proper noun. There are no universally agreed lists of which English geographic terms count as proper nouns. British and U.S. publishers have established their own guidelines in style guides: well-defined regions like South America and the Tennessee Valley are capitalized; directional adjectives like north China and southeast London are not. Generic geographic terms that are part of a place name, such as Atlantic Ocean and River Severn, are capitalized; generic terms following a capitalized generic term, such as the Yangtze River valley, are not. These are house rules, not universal law, and the existence of questionable capitalization even in respected publications reflects how essentially arbitrary orthographic classification can be.