Capital Letters

It is important to know which words to capitalise in your writing. Here's a list of the types of words that we need to capitalise in English.

1. Use a capital letter for the personal pronoun 'I':

• What can I say?

2. Use a capital letter to begin a sentence or to begin speech:

• The man arrived. He sat down.

• Suddenly Mary asked, "What's for dinner?"

3. Use capital letters for many abbreviations and acronyms:

• G.M.T. or GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)

• N.A.T.O. or NATO or Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)

4. Use a capital letter for days of the week, months of the year, holidays:

• Thursday, Friday

• March, April

• Easter

• Anzac Day

5. Use a capital letter for countries, languages & nationalities, religions:

• Thailand, Canada

• Cantonese, English

• Christianity, Islam

6. Use a capital letter for people's names and titles:

• William, Theo, Robert Redford

• Professor Mason, Dr Jones

• Captain Kirk, Queen Elizabeth II

7. Use a capital letter for trade-marks and names of companies and other organisations:

• Coca-Cola, Walmart

• Google, Hyundai

• the United Nations, the Red Cross

8. Use a capital letter for places and monuments:

• Sydney, Bangkok, Circular Quay

• the Statue of Liberty, Westminster Abbey

• Buckingham Palace, the White House

• Oxford Street, Madison Square

• Uranus, Mars, Sirius

• South America, the Middle East, the South Pole

9. Use a capital letter for names of vehicles like ships, trains and spacecraft:

• the Titanic

• the Orient Express, the Ghan

• Challenger 2, the Enterprise

10. Use a capital letter for titles of books, poems, songs, plays, films etc:

• War And Peace

• Moon River

• Hamilton

• Frozen, Gone With The Wind

11. Use capital letters (sometimes!) for headings, titles of articles, books etc, and newspaper headlines:

• HOW TO MAKE A MILLION

• Chapter 2: THE DEMISE OF CLINTON

• LIFE FOUND ON MARS!

• MAN BITES DOG