Five different styles of capitalisation can be applied to titles and words in English.

Minimal (sentence case)

This style uses an initial capital letter only on the first word of a phrase or title and any proper nouns.

Bringing them home report

History of Asian architecture

My brilliant career

It is used for:

  • headings (see Headings)
  • titles (see Presenting titles) of:
    • books
    • reports
    • articles
    • websites
    • plays
    • songs
    • poems
    • films
    • television programs
    • most other creative works.

Maximal (title case)

This style uses capitals for the first word of a phrase or title as well as all of its nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, but not conjunctions, determiners (e.g. a, the, his, their) or prepositions.

In this style:

  • capitalise all verbs, short (e.g. Tender Is the Night) or long (e.g. The Importance of Learning Fast)
  • do not capitalise prepositions, short (e.g. for, by, on, of) or long (e.g. between, over, through)
  • capitalise pronouns if they are significant to the meaning (e.g. Bringing Them Home Report)
  • for hyphenated compound words, capitalise both the first element and the other elements (e.g. Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Forty-Fifth Avenue)
  • for words with a hyphenated prefix, do not capitalise the base word unless it is a proper noun (e.g. Anti-inflammatory Diet, English for Non-English Speakers)
  • capitalise the first word after a colon in a title, including conjunctions, determiners and prepositions (e.g. Causes of Cancer: An Expert Review, Modern Grammar: For Editors).

Barack Obama

Journal of Nuclear Medicine

The Age

Narcotic Drugs Act 1967

It is used for:

  • proper and full formal names
  • titles of:
    • journals and newspapers
    • large works of music and album names 
    • books (according to the editorial style used by some publishers)
    • legislation and treaties.

Full capitals

This style uses capitals for all letters.

CSIRO

NASA

MEDIA RELEASE

IMPORTANT: do not leave valuables unattended

It is used for:

  • initialisms
  • acronyms
  • emphasis (use sparingly).

Medial capitals (camel case)

This style uses an additional capital letter in the middle of the word.

HarperCollins

YouTube

It is used for brand names.

Small capitals

This style uses capital letters that are only the height of the lower-case letters of the typeface.

RESULTS

D-glucose

It is used for:

  • design features (e.g. for captions)
  • some technical designations (e.g. in chemical names).