Big Letters, Simple Rules
You get a piece of work back and there's a neat circle round "england" — you forgot the capital. Fair enough. But then you overcorrect, and next thing you're writing "I asked my Teacher about the History Homework and my Mum said…", capitals sprinkled everywhere like they're free. So which words actually get one? It feels like there must be a long list of rules to learn. There isn't. There's basically one idea, and this page is here to hand it to you.
What this is
This is the map for capital letters. It won't drown you in exceptions. It shows you the single rule almost everything hangs off, points out the handful of genuinely tricky cases, and then aims you at the exact article for whatever's tripping you up. Capitals are one of those things that look fiddly and turn out to be mostly common sense once someone spells it out.
Why it's worth five minutes
Capital letters are tiny, but getting them wrong is one of the most visible slips there is. A missing capital on a name, or a rash of random ones, jumps out at a reader before they've even taken in the sentence. The flip side is that they're one of the quickest things to get properly right. Five minutes here and you stop dropping easy marks on something that was never actually hard.
The one idea
Here's the whole thing. A proper noun — the specific name of one particular person, place or thing — gets a capital. Everything else, by default, doesn't. Dog is any dog; Rex is one specific dog, so Rex gets the capital. A city is any city; London is one, so it's London. A river is general; the Thames is a name. Once you're asking "is this the actual name of one specific thing?", you've basically cracked it — and you can see straight away why "my Teacher" is wrong: teacher is a job, not a name.
Where to start
Find the bit that trips you and go straight there.
- Proper Nouns & Proper Adjectives — The Core Rule — the one rule the whole pillar hangs off. If you read only one, read this; everything else is just tidying the edges.
- Capitalising the First Word of a Sentence — the other automatic capital: the one that starts every sentence. Quick, but worth making automatic.
- Names of People, Places, Organisations & Brands — Nike, the NHS, Cardiff, Year 9. Which names take a capital (nearly all) and the odd ones that don't.
- Capital When Specific — the mum vs Mum puzzle, and north vs the North. The same word, capital or not depending on whether it's being used as a name.
- The Trap of Over-Capitalisation — if your problem is Sprinkling Capitals On Important-Feeling Words, this is your page: why we do it, and how to stop.
- Title Case or Sentence Case? — for titles and headings: which words get capitals in The Lord of the Rings, and why "of" and "the" miss out.
UK vs US
Good news here: capitals barely change between British and American English. The rules on this page work on both sides of the Atlantic — one less thing to keep track of.
Your first step
Read the core rule first — Proper Nouns & Proper Adjectives. Once "is this the name of one specific thing?" becomes your habit, most capital-letter decisions make themselves.