Capitalize Each Word

Capitalize each word vs title case

Capitalize each word is mechanical: every word gets a capital, including a, of and the. It is what Word's Capitalize Each Word command and the PROPER function in Excel and Google Sheets do, and it suits names, tags, menu labels and any list where every word carries the same weight.

Title case is a style rule for titles and headings. APA Style capitalizes the first word of a title and of a subtitle, the first word after a colon, every word of four letters or more (With, From, Between) and every major word, which includes short verbs and pronouns such as Is, Be and It. Only minor words of three letters or fewer stay lowercase: the articles a, an and the, short conjunctions such as and, but, or and nor, and short prepositions such as at, by, in, of, on, to and via.

The Title case option applies those rules to each line separately, so a pasted list of headings converts in one go. It leaves acronyms and words with internal capitals, such as NASA and iPhone, exactly as typed. What it cannot do is read grammar: it lowercases up wherever it appears, so a phrasal verb such as Set Up needs a manual check.

Why don't turns into Don'T in other tools

A common way to find where a word starts is to look for any character that is not a letter. An apostrophe is not a letter, so the t in don't is taken as the start of a new word. Microsoft documents exactly that rule for Excel's PROPER function, which capitalizes the first letter and any letter that follows a character other than a letter: don't comes back as Don'T and it's as It'S.

Python's str.title() has the same habit, and the Python documentation says so with its own example, in which they're bill's friends from the UK comes back as They'Re Bill'S Friends From The Uk. In JavaScript the familiar /\b\w/g one-liner hits the same wall: MDN defines a word boundary as the point between a word character (A to Z, a to z, 0 to 9 and the underscore) and anything else, and an apostrophe is anything else.

WordBench starts a new word only after a space, a hyphen, a slash, an underscore, an opening bracket or a double quote, or at a single quote that itself follows one of those. An apostrophe between two letters stays inside the word. The one trade-off is a name such as O'Neil: type the second capital yourself and the tool keeps it, because it never lowercases a letter unless you pick Lowercase rest first.

How to capitalize each word in Excel, Google Sheets and Word

Excel: in an empty column, enter =PROPER(A2), fill it down, then copy the results and paste them over the originals as values. PROPER also lowercases every other letter, which is why Microsoft's own examples turn this is a TITLE into This Is A Title, 2-way street into 2-Way Street and 76BudGet into 76Budget. Contractions come back as Don'T, so check them afterwards.

Google Sheets: =PROPER(A2) works the same way. Google's help page recommends it for proper nouns such as names and places rather than paragraphs, and warns that it lowercases every letter that is not at the start of a word, so mcLeod comes back as Mcleod.

Word: select the text, go to Home > Change Case and choose Capitalize Each Word, or press Shift+F3 until that case appears. Microsoft notes that this option also lowercases the other letters of each word, and that Word for the web does not support changing case, so use the desktop app or paste the text here.

How to capitalize each word in CSS, Python and JavaScript

CSS: text-transform: capitalize uppercases the first letter of each word when the text is displayed. MDN notes that the other characters keep the case they were written in, and that punctuation and symbols at the start of a word are skipped, so the capital lands on the first letter or number. Because it is a style, use it for headings and buttons, and convert the text itself when the capitals have to end up in your data.

Python: str.title() capitalizes each word but treats apostrophes as word breaks, as shown above. string.capwords(s) avoids that because it splits on whitespace only. It capitalizes each word with str.capitalize(), which lowercases the rest of the word, and joins the words with single spaces, so runs of spaces collapse and leading and trailing spaces are removed.

JavaScript has no built-in method for this. A short regular expression that uppercases a letter at the start of the text or after whitespace avoids the apostrophe problem: text.replace(/(^|\s)(\p{L})/gu, (m, gap, letter) => gap + letter.toUpperCase()). The u flag lets \p{L} match any Unicode letter, where \w only matches A to Z, digits and the underscore.

The same text, capitalized four ways

Each row shows one input as this tool returns it with and without title case, next to what Excel's PROPER function returns for the same text.

The Excel column follows Microsoft's documented rule for PROPER: a capital at the start and after any character that is not a letter, every other letter lowercase. Pick Lowercase rest first and the last row becomes Quarterly Report For Globex, the same as the Excel column but with apostrophes left intact.