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TextLabFree title case converter, four style guides
Title case converter for AP, Chicago, MLA and APA
This converter capitalises a headline under all four major style guides at once and shows you where they disagree, free and with no signup. AP and APA judge a small word by its length; Chicago and MLA judge it by its job, so Gone with the Wind under Chicago is Gone With the Wind under AP. Each lowercase word is listed with the rule that put it there, and hyphenated compounds, acronyms and the word after a colon are all handled rather than ignored.
- 100% free
- No signup
- AP · Chicago · MLA · APA
- Explains every lowercase word
- Hyphens and subtitles handled
Showing a worked example: it carries a long linking word, a subtitle, a prefixed compound and a two-letter word at the end, which is enough to separate all four guides.
A Walk Through the Mind of an Anti-Hero: What Editors Look For
Counts letters: four or more and it keeps its capital, however small the word feels
News desks, press releases, most brand blogs
A Walk through the Mind of an Anti-hero: What Editors Look For
Holds every linking word down whatever its length, so Through and Between lose theirs
Books, magazines, academic presses
A Walk through the Mind of an Anti-Hero: What Editors Look for
Names no last word, so a headline ending in for or with ends on a small letter
Humanities essays and Works Cited lists
A Walk Through the Mind of an Anti-Hero: What Editors Look for
Same letter count as AP, but nothing special happens to the closing word
Psychology and the social sciences, for headings and titles inside your text
Word by word, and why each guide does it
Only the words with a rule attached are listed; plain nouns and verbs take a capital everywhere and are left out.
| Word | AP | Chicago | MLA | APA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| aopens the title, and every guide capitalises that | A | A | A | A |
| througha linking word, and Chicago keeps those down however long they are | Through | through | through | Through |
| thean article — a, an and the are down in all four guides | the | the | the | the |
| ofa linking word, and Chicago keeps those down however long they are | of | of | of | of |
| anan article — a, an and the are down in all four guides | an | an | an | an |
| anti-heroa major word: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns all keep their capital | Anti-Hero | Anti-hero | Anti-Hero | Anti-Hero |
| whatopens the subtitle, so it is treated as a fresh first word | What | What | What | What |
| forcloses the title, and Chicago names the last word explicitly | For | For | for | for |
The three rules they split on
| Guide | Small words | Closing word | After a prefix hyphen |
|---|---|---|---|
| APAP Stylebook, composition titles | Down under 4 letters | Always capitalised | Anti-Hero |
| ChicagoThe Chicago Manual of Style, 8.159–8.161 | Down at any length | Always capitalised | Anti-hero |
| MLAMLA Handbook, 9th edition, 2.90 | Down at any length | No rule for it | Anti-Hero |
| APAPublication Manual of the APA, 7th edition, 6.17 | Down under 4 letters | No rule for it | Anti-Hero |
How to put a headline into title case
Three steps, and the third one is where the arguments get settled.
Type or paste the headline
One headline, chapter title, subject line or essay title at a time works best, subtitle included — the colon is part of the problem and the converter needs to see it. Until you type anything the page shows a worked example picked to make all four guides disagree at once, which is the quickest way to see what the argument is about before you supply a headline of your own.
Compare the four cards
AP, Chicago, MLA and APA each get a card with your headline set under their rules, and any word the guide holds down is printed in rose so the disagreements are visible at a glance. The line above the box counts how many genuinely different answers the four produced: one means your headline contains nothing they argue about, four means it hits every rule they split on.
Open the word-by-word table for the reason
Under the cards, every word that has a rule attached is listed with what each guide did to it and why — an article, a linking word of three letters, the closing word, the first word of the subtitle. Plain nouns and verbs are left out of the table because all four capitalise them. Copy takes whichever card you have settled on straight to the clipboard.
Technical specifications
| Guides implemented | Four: AP Stylebook composition titles, The Chicago Manual of Style 8.159–8.161, MLA Handbook 9th edition 2.90, and the APA Publication Manual 7th edition 6.17 |
|---|---|
| What decides a small word | AP and APA count letters — three or fewer and a linking word or conjunction goes down. Chicago and MLA go by job instead, so through, between and without stay down at any length |
| Word lists behind the rules | 3 articles (a, an, the), 7 coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet) and 60 linking words, with as and the to of an infinitive held down by all four guides |
| The closing word | Capitalised by AP and Chicago at the end of the title and of the subtitle; MLA and APA state their rule without it, so a small word there stays small |
| Hyphenated compounds | Both halves capitalised, except in Chicago after one of 34 fragments that cannot stand alone as words (anti-, pre-, e-, semi-, pseudo- and the rest); a half that is itself a linking word stays down in all four |
| Where a subtitle starts | After a colon, a question mark, an exclamation mark, an em dash or an en dash — the next word is treated as a first word again |
| Capitals already in the input | Runs of two or more capitals are left as typed, so NASA and BBC survive. A headline that is entirely in capitals is flattened first, automatically, and that step can be forced on or off |
| Known limit | Six words that work as both preposition and verb tail — up, on, off, out, in, down — need a human eye, because Chicago capitalises them only when they belong to the verb |
Frequently asked questions
Which style guide should I be using?
Whichever one the place you are publishing already uses, and if nobody has told you: AP for news, press releases and most company blogs; Chicago for books, magazines and general non-fiction; MLA for literature and humanities coursework; APA for psychology, education and the social sciences. The four agree far more often than they differ, so on a headline with no small words in the middle you will see one answer four times. Consistency inside one publication matters more than the choice between them.
Does the last word of a title always get a capital?
Under AP and Chicago yes, always, even if it is a two-letter preposition; under MLA and APA there is no such rule, so a title ending in for, with or at ends on a small letter. That single difference is why What Are You Waiting For is correct on a news site and What Are You Waiting for is correct in a Works Cited list. This converter applies the rule to the end of a subtitle as well as the end of the title itself.
How do I capitalise a hyphenated word in a title?
Capitalise both halves — Twenty-First-Century Politics, Long-Term Memory, Self-Report Data — with one exception that belongs to Chicago. Chicago keeps the second half down when the first is a fragment that cannot stand on its own as a word, which is why an anti-hero is an Anti-hero in a Chicago title and an Anti-Hero in the other three, and why an e-book is an E-book. Thirty-four such fragments are recognised here, from anti- and pre- to pseudo- and ultra-. A half that is itself a small linking word stays down everywhere: Jack-in-the-Box keeps its in and its the.
What happens to the word after a colon?
It is capitalised by all four guides, because the subtitle starts a fresh title. This converter treats a colon, a question mark, an exclamation mark and a dash the same way, so Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The Making of a Classic capitalises The. It is the commonest thing a hand-typed headline gets wrong, since the eye reads the subtitle as a continuation of the sentence before it.
Why is up lowercase in Look up the Word?
Because no converter can tell a preposition from the tail of a verb without understanding the sentence, and this one is honest about it. Chicago says explicitly that a word like up, on or out takes a capital when it belongs to the verb — Look Up, Turn On, Break Out — and stays down when it is a plain preposition. Since up looks identical in both jobs, every automatic tool that claims otherwise is guessing. Check any headline containing up, on, off, out, in or down before you publish it; those six are the only words this page will regularly get wrong.
Should the titles in my APA reference list be in title case?
No — APA reference lists use sentence case for the titles of articles, chapters and books, with only the first word, the first word after a colon and any proper noun capitalised. Title case in APA is for something else: the title on your title page, your headings, and the name of the journal in a reference. This trips up more students than any other rule on this page, and it means the same article title is written two different ways depending on where in your paper it appears.
Can it fix a headline that is already in capitals?
Yes, and it notices by itself — a headline entirely in capitals switches on the flattening step automatically, because otherwise every word in it would look like an acronym and nothing would move. Most title case tools fail here, returning the shouted line unchanged. The one cost of flattening is that a real acronym inside an all-caps headline cannot be recovered, so BBC comes back as Bbc and needs putting right by hand; a headline in normal case keeps its acronyms exactly as typed.
The four guides, and the three rules they actually fight over
Title case sounds like one convention and is four, but the disagreement is narrower than its reputation. All four guides capitalise the first word, every noun, verb, adjective, adverb and pronoun, and the first word of a subtitle; all four keep a, an and the down in the middle of a line. They part company on exactly three points. The first is how a small word is judged: AP and APA count its letters and capitalise anything with four or more, while Chicago and MLA look at the job it is doing and keep every linking word down however long it is. That is the rule behind the two spellings of the same film — Gone with the Wind under Chicago and Gone With the Wind under AP — and behind Chicago's own worked example, A River Runs through It, which looks like a typo until you know where it comes from.
The second point is the closing word. AP and Chicago protect it: whatever it is, it takes a capital, so a headline ending in a two-letter preposition still ends on a capital. MLA and APA write their rules without mentioning the last word at all, which is why a reference-list title can legitimately end on a small for. The third point is the hyphen. Capitalising both halves of a compound is the norm — Long-Term Memory, Twenty-First-Century Politics — but Chicago makes an exception when the first half is a fragment that cannot survive on its own, giving Anti-hero and E-book where the other three write Anti-Hero and E-Book. Those three differences are enough to produce four distinct spellings of a single headline, which is what the four cards above are for.
One trap sits outside the converter entirely. APA uses title case for your headings, your title page and the name of a journal, but its reference list is set in sentence case — first word, first word after a colon, proper nouns, and nothing else — so the same article title is written two different ways in the same paper depending on where it appears. Nor is title case the same operation as putting a capital on everything: that is capitalize each word, which gives The Lord Of The Rings and is what a spreadsheet column of names wants rather than a headline. When a title is heading for a web address instead of a page, the slug generator takes it the other way, and the character counter will tell you whether the finished headline survives the roughly 60 characters a search result shows.
Headlines you have not published yet
All four versions are worked out inside this browser tab, by a script already sitting in your own memory, so an embargoed headline or an unannounced book title is never transmitted anywhere and never appears in a log. Nothing you type is remembered between visits, and the four cards recompute from scratch on every keystroke rather than from anything stored. If the network drops after this page has loaded, the converter carries on working.