On Title Case

Published on July 27, 2024, filed under Design and Everything Else (RSS feed for all categories).

For many years (a decade? longer?), I’ve been using title case. There are different perspectives, but to me, it makes sense for titles.

I had started off reading up on the subject—a few articles and guidelines—and documenting for myself what was guidance inspired by the Associated Press and their Stylebook.

But, title case is not intuitive and not trivial. Capitalize My Title and their nine distinct title case options give a good taste for this. (I’ve kept noticing clashes with “my” standard, but the tool is nice to do quick cross-checks.)

Anecdotally—I’ve never met someone who suggested otherwise—, title case doesn’t seem to be intuitive to anyone, including native English speakers.

While over time, I could memorize most rules by heart, I also felt that there were cases where I wanted to be more sure. Like, capitalization of “neither… nor…”, but also whether “from” should be capitalized or not (I hadn’t capitalized either).

Switching to the New York Times Style

Eventually, the situation changed and cleared up for me when I realized I could shift one gear down and two gears up by going by a different standard, one that was closer to me:

I was—and still am—a New York Times subscriber, meaning I’d have continuous exposure to their title case standard (where they use it, which isn’t consistent).

I was generally interested in the New York Times style guidelines, which had had me order a copy of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (a physical one even, a rare exception).

Furthermore, tools like Capitalize My Title ^* allowed to perform title case cross-checks and conversions also using New York Times conventions.

That was enough for me to decide to update my previously AP-inspired documentation, to steer by New York Times rules instead.

Documenting and Extending a Title Case Standard

Here is the standard, here are the conventions I now use for all titles and (most) headers:

• Always capitalize the first and last words of a title.

  This rule I haven’t seen spelled out by the New York Times, but it’s something I grew up with and am keeping.

• Capitalize all nouns, pronouns, and verbs, and all other words of four or more letters.

• Handle shorter words as follows:

  • Capitalize: No, Nor, Not, Off, Out, So, Up; inferred: To and From

  • Lowercase: a, and, as, at, but, by, en, for, if, in, of, on, or, the, to, v./vs., via; inferred: aka, an, per

• Keep in mind (via The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage):

  • Some of the “little” headline prepositions occasionally turn into adverbs, modifying the preceding word; in those situations, they are capitalized: Mayor Drops In; Meeting Drones On. Sometimes even as a preposition, such a word will attach to the preceding verb and should be uppercased: Cared For by His Mother; Attended To in an Emergency Room. But idioms like Call on, Call for, and Wait on, when followed by objects, do not fall into that category, and the prepositions remain lowercase: Mayor Calls on President to Yield; Senator Calls for Decision. A few expressions can occur in both forms: They Waited on Tables but Customers Were Waited On in Turn.

  • When the preposition for takes the place of a verb meaning to support or advocate, capitalize it: Mayor For Health Insurance Plan.

  • In general, capitalize both parts of a hyphenated compound in a headline: Cease-Fire; Able-Bodied; Sit-In; Make-Believe; One-Fifth. […] In sums of money: $7 Million; $34 Billion.

    This last quote leaves out a rule and its exceptions to lowercase after a hyphen when the respective word is used with a prefix of two or three letters. I prefer the consistency of capitalizing all parts of compounds.

• Use Capitalize My Title to double-check (or to convert a title).

❧ How is this for you? Do you use title case, too? How do you ensure consistency? Do you use sentence case—or some other system (like Smashing Magazine, who capitalize every word in a title)? I’m rarely enabling comments anymore, so email me, or follow up publicly by replying to the toot for this post!

^* Note also tooling like Title Case Converter I, Title Case Converter II, TitleCase, or the Title Capitalization Tool, though only the first one would be clear about supporting New York Times conventions.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m somewhat close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

If you’d like to do me a favor, interpret charitably (I speak three languages, and they do collide), yet be critical and give feedback, so that I can make improvements. Thank you!