Title Case Rules: APA, Chicago, MLA and AP Compared
Updated 17 October 2026
Should “with” be capitalised? What about “is”? The answer depends on the style guide. Here are the four major title case styles compared, with examples.
Title case means capitalising the important words in a title. Every style guide agrees on capitalising nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. They disagree about the short words — articles, prepositions and conjunctions — and that is where most mistakes happen.
The rules side by side
| Style | Keep lowercase (unless first or last word) | Notable rule |
|---|---|---|
| APA (7th edition) | Articles (a, an, the), short conjunctions and short prepositions of three letters or fewer | Capitalise every word of four letters or more, including prepositions such as “With” and “From”. Capitalise the first word after a colon. |
| Chicago (Chicago Manual of Style) | Articles, prepositions of any length, the conjunctions and, but, for, or, nor, and the words “to” and “as” | Long prepositions such as “between” and “through” stay lowercase. |
| MLA (9th edition) | Articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions and “to” in infinitives | Similar to Chicago in practice. |
| AP (news style) | Articles, and conjunctions and prepositions of three letters or fewer | Capitalise words of four or more letters. AP applies this to composition titles such as books and films; AP headlines use sentence case. |
All four capitalise the first and last word of a title. APA and Chicago also capitalise the first word of a subtitle after a colon.
One title, four styles
Here is how the converter treats “a guide to living with the past: what we learned from the war”:
- APA: A Guide to Living With the Past: What We Learned From the War
- Chicago: A Guide to Living with the Past: What We Learned from the War
- MLA: A Guide to Living with the Past: What We Learned from the War
- AP: A Guide to Living With the Past: What We Learned From the War
The difference is the four-letter prepositions “with” and “from”: APA and AP capitalise them; Chicago and MLA do not.
Convert a title to APA, Chicago, MLA or AP →
Words people often get wrong
- Short verbs are capitalised: “Is”, “Be”, “Are” and “Was” are verbs, not minor words — “What Is Truth?”, not “What is Truth?”
- Short pronouns are capitalised: “It”, “He”, “We”, “Us”.
- “If” and “That”: Chicago capitalises both. APA lowercases “if” (a conjunction of three letters or fewer) but capitalises “That”.
- Hyphenated compounds: APA capitalises both parts of a hyphenated major word (“Self-Report”); Chicago usually does too, except for articles, prepositions and conjunctions after the hyphen.
Title case or sentence case?
Many academic styles use different cases in different places. APA, for example, uses title case for the title of your paper and for headings, but sentence case for the titles of articles and books in the reference list. Check which one your style guide wants before converting. The sentence case converter handles the other half.
Automatic converters cannot tell whether a word like “up” is a preposition (“Up the Hill”) or part of a phrasal verb (“Giving Up”), which most styles capitalise. Always give a converted title a final read.