---
name: Title case
slug: title-case
category: typography
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: Capitalising the first letter of each significant word in a heading
  or label, leaving short articles, conjunctions and prepositions lowercase.
aliases:
  - name: headline case
  - name: capital case
  - name: start case
tags:
  - content-design
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - all-caps
    - sentence-case
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: Title case capitalization (APA Style)
    url: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/capitalization/title-case
  - title: Title case (Wikipedia)
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: Apple-style headings, buttons, and menu labels
---

Title case capitalises the words that carry meaning and leaves the joinery alone.
Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs go up; the articles (a, an, the), the short
conjunctions (and, but, or) and the prepositions stay down, except when one of them
lands first or last, where it goes up regardless. That is the whole rule until you
reach a preposition of four letters or more, and there the style guides part
company: Chicago keeps every preposition lowercase however long it is, while AP
raises the ones of four letters and up, so "with" is down in one house and up in
the other and no reviewer can settle it from first principles.

The convention survives in interfaces mostly because Apple kept it. Menu titles,
menu items, buttons and alert titles on Apple's platforms use title-style
capitalisation, so a Mac application that switches to sentence case reads as
foreign next to everything around it. Microsoft went the other way years ago and
now writes almost everything in sentence case, which is why a cross-platform
product usually has to pick a side rather than inherit one. What no product should
do is reach for `text-transform: capitalize`, which raises every word including the
ones the rule exists to keep down, and turns "The Rise and Fall of a Harbour" into
something no style guide recognises. Title case is written by hand or not at all.

Against [sentence case](/sentence-case) the difference is tone. Title case reads as
formal, deliberate, a little older, which is exactly right on a marketing headline
or a menu bar and can feel stuffy on a settings screen that is trying to talk to
someone. It is also slower to write consistently, because every label becomes a
small judgement call, and inconsistency is more visible here than in any other
typographic decision: two adjacent buttons capitalised differently look like a bug.
[All caps](/all-caps) is a third answer and a different tool, since it discards case
information rather than distributing it, and belongs on short labels only.

The practical failure is translation. Title case is close to meaningless outside
English, so a string prepared this way and sent to a translator comes back sentence
cased in French and noun-capitalised in German, and the interface stops matching
itself. If a product ships in one language and wants the older, editorial register,
title case is a reasonable choice made once and written into the content guide.
If it ships in twenty, the case rule should be the one the other nineteen can
actually follow.