Apply AP, Chicago, or APA title capitalization rules

AP, Chicago, and APA agree that important words deserve capitals, but they differ on prepositions, conjunctions, short words, and compounds. This formatter applies the selected guide consistently while preserving the title's punctuation and spacing. Use it for an individual headline in the browser or add it to an editorial workflow through the API when many titles must follow the same house style.

Choose the guide your publication actually follows

Start by selecting AP, Chicago, or APA rather than relying on a generic idea of title case. AP style is common in journalism and communications. It capitalizes principal words while leaving articles, short conjunctions, and short prepositions lowercase unless they begin or end the title. Chicago is widely used in books and long-form publishing. Its list of lowercase function words is broader, particularly for prepositions, so a title formatted in Chicago style can differ visibly from the same title formatted in AP. APA is standard in many academic and social-science settings. Its title-case rule treats words of four letters or more as major words, while shorter articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions normally remain lowercase. Enter the title as it currently appears; mixed, upper, or lower case is acceptable. The formatter identifies the words, applies the chosen rule set, and returns both the corrected title and a canonical style label. An unrecognized guide produces an input error instead of silently applying a vague default, which prevents accidental inconsistency in automated publishing systems.

Understand how boundaries and compounds are handled

Position matters in every supported guide. The first and last words are capitalized even when those words would ordinarily be minor. The first word of a subtitle after a colon, en dash, or em dash is also treated as a new beginning. Punctuation and whitespace are retained, so quotation marks, parentheses, commas, and deliberate spacing do not disappear during formatting. Hyphenated expressions are examined as compounds: their components are capitalized according to the selected guide rather than turning the entire expression into an undifferentiated string. Existing all-uppercase abbreviations such as NASA or HTML remain uppercase, which avoids damaging recognizable initialisms. Other words are normalized before the appropriate initial capital is applied, producing predictable output even when the source title was typed in all lowercase or inconsistent case. These deterministic choices are especially useful in a content pipeline because identical inputs always produce identical outputs. The tool does not attempt to infer proper names, trademark styling, scientific notation, or a publication's private exceptions. Review those specialized terms after formatting, just as you would when applying a style guide by hand.

Use consistent title case across an editorial workflow

For a single heading, paste the title, select its guide, and copy the formatted result. For repeated work, send the same two fields through the API: the title text and the style name. The result is a small JSON object that can be written directly into a content-management field, compared with an existing headline, or recorded as part of an editorial check. Keeping the guide explicit is important when teams publish to several destinations. A newsroom headline may require AP while a journal submission requires APA and a book chapter follows Chicago. The same source wording can therefore pass through different rules without changing the surrounding workflow. Because processing is local and deterministic, the capability does not send text to a third-party service, consult a language model, or introduce random variations. It is designed for English title-capitalization conventions; it does not translate content or claim to apply the orthographic rules of other languages. Automated formatting should be the consistent first pass, followed by human review for brand names, intentionally stylized words, and context-sensitive terms that no mechanical title-case rule can reliably identify.