Title Case Converter
Capitalise a title the way APA 7, MLA 9 or Chicago 17 actually require - prepositions, subtitles and hyphens included.
Capitalise every word of four letters or more, whatever its part of speech, plus the first and last word and the first word after a colon.
Your title
one per lineAPA 7 title case
Your converted title will appear here.
Sentence case
Your converted title will appear here.
Used for APA reference-list entries and most journal article titles.
Why the three styles disagree
Most title case converters apply one rule: capitalise everything except a handful of small words. That rule matches none of the three styles a student is actually marked against, which is why the output so often comes back marked.
The disagreement is not arbitrary. APA uses a mechanical length rule - four letters or more gets a capital, whatever the word is doing - because it is unambiguous and fast to apply consistently across a reference list. MLA and Chicago use part of speech instead, which is more faithful to how titles read but requires you to know that "between" is a preposition.
So the same title comes out three ways. "A Study of the Relationship Between Sleep and Memory" in APA becomes "A Study of the Relationship between Sleep and Memory" in MLA and Chicago. Both are correct; only one is correct for your assignment.
The three rules that catch people out
Subtitles. Everything after a colon starts fresh: the first word takes a capital in all three styles even when it is "the" or "a". Generic converters treat the subtitle as a continuation and lowercase it.
Prepositions of four or more letters. This is the single biggest visible difference between APA and the other two. "With", "From", "Between", "Through", "Against" - capitalised in APA, lowercase in MLA and Chicago.
The last word. It always takes a capital, whatever it is. "The Things We Do Not Talk About" ends in a preposition and it is still capitalised, in every style.
- APA 7 - four letters or more takes a capital, regardless of part of speech.
- MLA 9 - articles, prepositions and coordinating conjunctions stay lowercase at any length.
- Chicago 17 - as MLA, and also lowercases "as"; capitalises both halves of a hyphenated compound.
- All three - first word, last word, and the first word after a colon always take a capital.
Title case is not the same as your reference list
A point that costs marks quietly: APA uses title case for the titles of journals and for headings, but SENTENCE case for the titles of articles, chapters and books inside the reference list. So the article is "A study of the relationship between sleep and memory" while the journal it appeared in is "Journal of Sleep Research".
That is why this page gives you both conversions at once rather than making you run the tool twice. If you are formatting a bibliography, the sentence-case box is usually the one you want.
What a converter cannot do for you
A handful of words change capitalisation depending on what they are doing in the sentence, and no tool without a grammatical parse can resolve them. "Up", "on", "in", "out" and "over" are prepositions in some titles and adverbs or verb particles in others, and every style capitalises the adverb while lowercasing the preposition.
Rather than guess, this tool marks those words and tells you which way each reading falls. It is a small number of cases, but they are exactly the ones a marker notices.
Proper nouns are the other limit. The tool preserves capitalisation that looks deliberate - NASA, iPhone, pH - but it has no way of knowing that a lowercase name in your title is a name. Check those yourself.
Common questions
What is the difference between APA, MLA and Chicago title case?
APA capitalises every word of four letters or more, whatever its part of speech - so it gives "Between", "With" and "From". MLA and Chicago decide by part of speech instead: prepositions stay lowercase at any length, so the same words come out as "between", "with" and "from". Chicago additionally lowercases "as". All three capitalise the first and last word, and the first word after a colon.
Should the first word after a colon be capitalised?
Yes, in all three styles. The part after a colon is treated as a subtitle and starts with a capital regardless of what the word is. This is the single most common mistake in generic title case converters, which usually treat the subtitle as a continuation of the sentence.
How do you capitalise a hyphenated word in a title?
Capitalise both halves when both are major words - "Twentieth-Century Prose", "Well-Made Play". APA and MLA leave a minor second half lowercase, so you get constructions like "Follow-up"; Chicago capitalises the second half regardless. This tool applies each style's rule for you.
Why does the tool flag some words instead of just deciding?
Because a few words genuinely depend on the sentence and no converter can know which you mean. "Up" is an adverb in "Look Up the Answer" and a preposition in "Notes up the Coast", and the styles capitalise those differently. Rather than guess and be silently wrong, the tool tells you which words to check.
Does it handle ALL CAPS titles?
Yes. If the whole title is in capitals it is treated as shouting and converted normally. Acronyms like NASA are only preserved when the surrounding text is in mixed case, which is the only situation where an all-capitals word is distinguishable from a shouted one.
Is anything uploaded?
No. The conversion is string handling that runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent to a server or stored.