Capitalization: An Upper Case Study

There are probably more rules for capitalization than for any other grammatical rule. Here is the definitive list.

We capitalize the first letters of:

• A sentence, e.g., "Now is the hour of our discontent"

• All proper nouns, e.g., Adam, Chicago, Fido

• Company names, e.g., Amazon, General Motors

• Book, Film, Essay, and Written Article Titles; e.g., The Great Gatsby, Little Miss Sunshine, Common Sense. Capitalize all first letters unless they are conjunctions, e.g., The Year of Living Dangerously

• Days of the week, months of the year, e.g., Saturday, the 4th of October

• Celestial bodies and regions, e.g., the Moon, Andromeda, Space

• Organizations, e.g., The Labour Party, Amnesty International

• Personal and professional titles, e.g., Admiral Halsey, Father Murphy, Lady Dianne

• When a common noun is referring to a proper noun, e.g., the Queen inspected the troops, there was tension in the Capitol today.

• Definitive spans of time, e.g., the Renaissance, the Dark Ages

• Product and brand names, e.g., Quaker Oats, Ford Focus

• The Internet

We capitalize all letters of:

• Abbreviations that use acronyms, e.g., HDMI, USA

• Monograms of names and companies, e.g., JFK, GE

Directional Words - north, south, east, and west (and all points in between)

They are not capitalized,

• When merely indicating a geographic direction e.g., Los Angeles is south of San Francisco

They are capitalized when

• Part of a proper noun, e.g., East London

• Referring to a particular geographical region, e.g., He got a job up North for the summer.