Capitals

You've almost certainly done this. You've written Tuesday, English, Mum, and Google without a second thought — then stopped dead over a sentence and wondered, does "Mayor" need a capital here? What about "north"? And why does that headline capitalise every second word? Capitalisation [US: capitalization] looks simple from across the room. Up close it's a cluster of small, overlapping habits, and it's easy to feel you're the only one guessing.

Here's the good news. Almost all of it hangs from two anchor rules:

1. A sentence starts with a capital letter. Whatever word opens the sentence — a name, a "the", an ordinary word — that first letter goes up. It's a signal to your reader: new thought starts here.
2. Proper nouns and proper adjectives take a capital letter. If a word names one particular person, place, thing, or brand — Sarah, Bristol, Monday, the Nile, Google — or is built from one of those — a Shakespearean sonnet, a Victorian terrace, French cinema — it gets a capital.

Get those two into your fingers and you've solved most of it. Everything else in this pillar — job titles, seasons, "north", capitals after a colon, the urge to Capitalise Every Important Word — is either one of those two rules stretching to fit an awkward case, or a style choice sitting on top. Nobody's born knowing this. You're not late; you're reading the map.

The map: nine articles, grouped

This page is only the signpost. Each line below is a full article of its own — dip into the one that matches the sentence in front of you, and leave the rest on the shelf until you need them.

Start here — the anchor rules

• First word of a sentence — The most basic capital of all, plus the fiddly bits: the first word inside quotation marks, and what happens after a full stop, a question mark, or a dash.
• Proper nouns & proper adjectives — the core rule — The heavyweight of the whole pillar. When a word names something specific it takes a capital; when it names a type, it doesn't. This is where most everyday questions get answered.

Names and the "specific vs general" family

• Names of people, places, organisations & brands — Personal names, cities, countries, companies, and product names — the clean patterns and the hazy edges.
• Capital when specific — The single most useful habit in real writing: the Prime Minister vs a prime minister, Mum vs my mum, the South vs drive south, and why the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth behave the way they do.

Titles, headings, and documents

• Title case vs sentence case — How to capitalise the titles of books, films, songs, and articles. This is the one place in the pillar with a genuine UK/US style tendency — more on that below.
• Capitalisation in letters, emails, headings & lists — The practical, everyday side: opening lines, subject lines, report headings, and the first word of a bullet point.

Capitals meeting punctuation

• Capitals after colons, inside quotations & around punctuation — The capitalisation decision when a capital bumps into a colon, a quotation mark, or a bracket. The punctuation marks themselves belong to Pillar 6; here we only settle whether the next letter goes up.

Special cases and the trap

• Special cases — The tidy pile of oddments: why I is always capital, how to handle NASA and BBC, brand styling like iPhone, and religious terms.
• The trap of over-capitalisation — Why capitals creep into reports, CVs [US: resumes], and shop signs, and how to strip them back. Importance doesn't earn a capital; being a particular named thing does.

You don't need to read them in order. Start where the question is biting you, then come back for the rest.

UK and US: a shared system, honestly

Compared with spelling, capitalisation is wonderfully quiet across the Atlantic. Almost the entire system is shared — the same two rules run in Bristol and Boston. The word itself picks up a spelling toggle (capitalisation / capitalization), and you'll see those flagged inline in the articles, but the practice doesn't split. You won't find a UK/US quarrel over Monday, French, or the start of a sentence.

There is exactly one genuine style tendency worth your attention: in Title case vs sentence case, US house style leans hard toward title case (To Kill a Mockingbird), while UK style is more mixed and often at ease with sentence case (To kill a mockingbird), especially in journalism and academic work. That's it. One tendency, in one article. I won't manufacture Atlantic drama where there isn't any.

What this pillar does not cover

This hub is stubborn about its borders. Capitalisation is forever tempted to rebuild half of English "for context" — and I won't. If your question is really one of these, follow the link and come back when the only thing left to decide is capital or not?

• What a sentence actually is — subject, verb, complete thought — lives in Pillar 1: The Sentence. We only decide whether that first letter is a capital.
• What a proper noun is as a word class, and how it sits beside common nouns and adjectives, is Pillar 2: Nouns & Adjectives. These articles assume you've met the category; they tell you when to capitalise it. (Clause structure, if that's what you're after, is Pillar 3.)
• How the punctuation marks work — colons, quotation marks, dashes, end marks — is Pillar 6, especially Semicolons & Colons, Quotation Marks (UK/US), and End Punctuation. This pillar only owns the capital that sometimes follows or flanks those marks.

That's the whole map. Two rules, nine doors, almost no Atlantic drama. Open the one that matches your sentence.