Free Title Case Converter – AP, APA, MLA & Chicago

Capitalize Titles the Right Way, Every Time

A title case converter capitalizes a headline or heading according to the rules of a chosen style guide. The reason a dedicated tool exists is that title capitalization is not simply "uppercase the first letter of every word" — each major style guide (AP, APA, MLA, Chicago) has its own list of small words that stay lowercase in certain positions, and remembering those lists while writing is a distraction nobody needs. You paste your title, pick the style, and get back a correctly capitalized version you can trust without second-guessing whether "with" should be uppercase in AP style or whether "between" counts as a short preposition in Chicago. The logic works in layers. First the text is lowercased entirely to normalize any existing capitalization. Then it is split into words on spaces, hyphens, and colons. Each word is checked against the small-words list for the selected style — articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet), and prepositions under a length threshold. Words not on that list are capitalized. The first and last words of the title are always capitalized regardless of what they are, and the first word after a colon is capitalized in styles that treat the colon as a sentence boundary. AP keeps prepositions of three letters or fewer lowercase; APA uses four; MLA and Chicago follow broader lists. Sentence case skips the small-words logic entirely and capitalizes only the first letter of the whole string plus any letter following terminal punctuation. Start case capitalizes every word unconditionally, which is useful for labels and UI elements where style-guide compliance does not apply. A concrete comparison. Input: the effects of climate change on marine biodiversity. AP style output: The Effects of Climate Change on Marine Biodiversity — "of" and "on" are three letters, so they stay lowercase. APA style output: The Effects of Climate Change on Marine Biodiversity — same result because both words are under four letters. Chicago output: The Effects of Climate Change on Marine Biodiversity — same, because "of" and "on" are prepositions. MLA output: The Effects of Climate Change on Marine Biodiversity. Sentence case: The effects of climate change on marine biodiversity. Start case: The Effects Of Climate Change On Marine Biodiversity — notice "Of" and "On" are capitalized because start case has no exceptions. The differences are subtle but editors notice them, and journals reject submissions with incorrect heading capitalization. Who uses this regularly. A grad student formatting 85 reference titles for an APA bibliography who cannot afford to mis-capitalize a single one before submission. A blogger writing ten article headlines and switching between AP for the publication and sentence case for social media cards. A UX writer converting feature names into sentence-case UI labels that match an existing design system. A journalist preparing a subhead for a print layout where AP style is house standard. A book author capitalizing chapter titles according to Chicago before sending the manuscript to an editor. A marketer preparing ad copy where each headline must follow platform-specific capitalization guidelines — Google Ads prefers sentence case while a landing page uses title case. The main pitfall is proper nouns and acronyms. The converter has no dictionary of names, so it will lowercase "iphone" to "Iphone" (start case) instead of the correct "iPhone", and it will flatten "NASA" to "Nasa" in sentence case because it treats it as an ordinary word. After converting, scan the output for brand names, acronyms, and technical terms that need manual correction. Hyphenated compounds are another edge: "well-known" in AP style capitalizes only the first element ("Well-known"), but in Chicago both parts capitalize ("Well-Known") — this tool follows the selected guide's rule, but double-check compound adjectives if your editor is particular. All processing runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded or stored, making it safe for unpublished headlines and confidential document titles.

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