Title Case Converter

How it is calculated

The tool follows English headline rules. It trims the text, splits it on whitespace and capitalises the first letter of each word, with a few exceptions. These 24 short words stay lowercase unless they are the first or last word or follow a colon, question mark, exclamation mark or dash: a, an, the, and, but, or, nor, as, at, by, for, in, of, off, on, per, to, up, via, vs, with, from, into, onto. Other short words such as is, be or are are capitalised. Words that already look like acronyms (NASA) or brand spellings (iPhone) are kept as typed, but only when the text also contains lowercase letters; a text typed entirely in capitals is lowercased and then capitalised normally. Every part of a hyphenated word gets a capital (Well-Known). It also returns the word count, counting each whitespace-separated piece, and empty text gives no result.

Common mistakes

• Pasting a headline typed entirely in capitals and expecting acronyms to survive. When no lowercase letter is present the tool cannot tell NASA from any other word, so THE LORD OF THE RINGS becomes The Lord of the Rings and a real acronym would be lowercased and re-capitalised as an ordinary word; fix such words by hand.
• Expecting a small word such as a or the to stay lowercase after a colon or dash. Here it is capitalised (A New Era), which matches many style guides but not every one.
• Assuming it matches APA, MLA or Chicago exactly. The tool uses one fixed list of 24 small words, while the guides differ on words such as is, be and prepositions of four letters or more.
• Using it for non-English text. The small-word list is English only, so a German or French title will capitalise words that should stay lowercase.
• Expecting line breaks or double spaces to be kept. All whitespace is collapsed into single spaces, so a multi-line list becomes one line.