Title Case Calculator - AP, APA, MLA Style Rules

The title case calculator is a browser-based text formatter that rewrites any pasted title or headline so it follows a chosen style guide's capitalization rules. Pick a style and the calculator returns the same string recased with live character, word, and style counts.

• • Article and blog post titles: Capitalize article headlines for a publication, blog, or CMS by picking the matching style guide and pasting the working title.
• • Academic paper and chapter titles: Format the title of a paper, dissertation, or chapter using the style required by the journal, university press, or course instructor.
• • Book, album, and series titles: Apply the right capitalization to a book title, album name, or series title for a press release, catalog entry, or product page.
• • Slide deck and email subject lines: Rewrite slide titles, email subject lines, and short marketing snippets so every headline reads in the same consistent style.

Title case looks simple until you try to apply it consistently across a stack of headlines. The four-letter preposition is the most common disagreement between styles.

Paste the title, pick the matching style guide, and copy the rewritten result. The source and output counts help a title fit a 60-character display cap or a publisher's headline limit.

When the body paragraphs of the same document need sentence case rather than title case, the sentence case converter applies the inverse rule that capitalizes only the first word of every sentence and leaves the rest lowercase.

The calculator splits the source text into whitespace-delimited tokens, classifies each token as major or minor, then applies the chosen style guide's capitalization rule. A preserve list restores acronyms and brand names to their original casing.

• text: The pasted source string, truncated to 10,000 code points before processing.
• style: The chosen style guide: ap, apa, mla, ama, chicago, bluebook, or nyt.
• collapseWhitespace: When yes, runs of whitespace are collapsed to a single space and the ends are trimmed.
• preserveList: Comma-separated list of words (acronyms, brand names, proper nouns) restored to their original casing.

Every style guide agrees that the first and last words of a title or subtitle are always capitalized, and so is the first word after a colon. The disagreement is in how to treat short prepositions and conjunctions in the middle.

Hyphenated compounds follow the printed rules: 'Self-Report' capitalizes both halves, while 'Mid-year' keeps the second half lowercase because the first half is a hyphenated prefix.

According to APA Style, APA Style capitalizes major words and any word of four letters or more while lowercasing short conjunctions, articles, and prepositions of three letters or fewer, except when a word is the first or last word of a title or subtitle.

According to The Chicago Manual of Style Online, Hyphenated compound words capitalize the second element when the second element is an adjective or a stressed word, and the first and last words of titles and subtitles are always capitalized regardless of part of speech.

When the same draft also needs the cited book or journal titles in the references to be italic, the italic text calculator applies the same Unicode styling to each cited work so the bibliography matches the title case rule.

Four ideas decide how a title comes out of the calculator: the major vs minor split, the cutoff for short prepositions, the hyphenated-prefix rule, and the preserve list.

The major vs minor split is the most useful mental model for predicting output: a word is either a major word that gets capitalized or a minor word that gets lowercased.

The four-letter cutoff is worth memorizing: APA, AMA, Chicago 18th, and Bluebook capitalize prepositions of four letters or more; MLA lowercases every preposition.

When stray all-caps or all-lowercase passages need to be flattened to a single case before the style rule is applied, the uppercase to lowercase converter rewrites every letter in one pass without the major and minor word logic.

Five short steps cover the common workflows, from a quick APA-style headline to a Bluebook citation with protected acronyms.

1. 1 Paste a title or headline: Type or paste the working title into the source text area. Inputs longer than 10,000 characters are truncated to keep the result panel within browser limits.
2. 2 Pick a style guide: Choose the style guide that the publication expects: AP for journalism, APA for the social sciences, MLA for humanities coursework, AMA for medical writing, Chicago for publishing, Bluebook for legal, or NYT for headlines.
3. 3 Decide on whitespace collapse: Leave the toggle on No to keep every typed space and newline, or switch to Yes to collapse runs of spaces and trim the ends.
4. 4 Add acronyms and brands to the preserve list: Type a comma-separated list of words to keep in their original casing after the style rule runs.
5. 5 Read the output and copy it: The result panel shows the rewritten string alongside source and output character and word counts. Copy the output once the style and counts match the publication's requirements.

A blog editor pastes 'running with data: a beginner's handbook', leaves the style on APA, and the calculator returns 'Running With Data: A Beginner's Handbook' with 'With' and the word after the colon capitalized.

When the formatted title needs to fit a 60-character display cap or a publisher headline limit, the word count calculator reports the same character and word totals in a longer-form format so the editor can trim before publishing.

The title case calculator removes the manual checking each preposition and article against a printed style sheet, so a stack of headlines can be recased in seconds.

• • Seven style guides in one tool: Switch between AP, APA, MLA, AMA, Chicago, Bluebook, and NYT without retyping the source string or opening a different tool.
• • Acronym and brand name preservation: The preserve list keeps NASA, USA, PhD, and iPhone in their original casing so the style rule does not turn them into 'Nasa' or 'Iphone'.
• • Live character and word counts: Source and output counts are reported side by side so a title that needs to fit a 60-character display cap or a publisher's headline limit can be checked before publishing.
• • Hyphenated compound handling: Self-Report, Cost-Benefit, Mid-year, and Anti-hero are all cased the way the chosen style guide describes.
• • Subtitle rule built in: The first word after a colon in a subtitle is always capitalized regardless of style.
• • Whitespace control: Optional whitespace collapse trims and de-duplicates spaces in the source so a pasted draft comes out as a clean single-spaced title.

For a publication that mixes AP and APA articles in the same issue, the style select lets the editor move between articles without rebuilding the title from scratch.

For a student writing a dissertation, the preserve list is the easiest way to keep every acronym and brand name in its canonical casing while the surrounding words are recased.

For students running a paper-title workflow, the essay word count calculator reports the same word and character totals in a format designed for thesis drafts and coursework submissions.

Four factors decide what the title-cased output looks like: the chosen style guide, the source text casing, the preserve list, and whitespace handling.

• • The rule for 'to' in infinitives is style-specific: AP, Chicago, and AMA lowercase 'to' in the middle of a title, while MLA also lowercases it; APA treats 'to' as a two-letter preposition and so lowercases it as well. Pick the style explicitly rather than assuming a single rule covers every guide.
• • Proper nouns that are not in the preserve list will be recased by the rule. Add proper nouns to the preserve list when the rule should leave them alone regardless of style.

When the source contains pasted text from a PDF, invisible characters may be present and can land in the output.

Accented Latin letters follow the same rule because the major vs minor classification looks at the letter string.

According to APA Style, sentence case is used for the titles of articles, books, reports, and other works in reference list entries, while title case is used for works appearing in running text, for table titles, figure titles, and for the paper's own title and named section headings.

When the result needs to be rendered as an all-caps banner or social-media handle, the lowercase to uppercase converter converts the title-cased output to all-uppercase in a single pass while keeping word boundaries intact.