MLA title case converter

The MLA title case converter applies a consistent set of English capitalization rules to titles for essays, research papers, books, articles, and works cited entries. It capitalizes principal words while lowercasing articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions in ordinary positions. Unlike a generic capitalize-every-word filter, it recognizes subtitle boundaries and treats subordinating conjunctions as principal words. Paste a title in mixed, lowercase, or uppercase text and receive a deterministic MLA-styled result without sending the text to an AI model or relying on an external service.

What MLA title case capitalizes

MLA title case begins by capitalizing the first word and the final word of a title, regardless of their grammatical roles. Between those positions, it capitalizes principal words: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions. That final category matters because words such as because, although, and while may be incorrectly lowered by simplistic tools that treat every conjunction alike.

This converter keeps those words capitalized while lowercasing the coordinating conjunctions and, but, for, nor, or, so, and yet when they occur in an ordinary internal position. Articles—a, an, and the—also remain lowercase internally. Prepositions are lowercased according to their grammatical category rather than an arbitrary word-length cutoff, so a longer preposition such as between or throughout remains lowercase while a short verb can still be capitalized.

The tool normalizes the letters in each detected word, which makes an all-uppercase draft and a lowercase draft produce the same output. It preserves the punctuation and spacing around words instead of rebuilding the title from tokens. This behavior is useful when a citation contains quotation marks, parentheses, an em dash, or deliberately spaced punctuation that should survive capitalization unchanged.

The result provides one clear MLA rendering rather than several competing style options.

How subtitles and hyphenated compounds are handled

MLA capitalization restarts at the beginning of a subtitle. After a colon, em dash, or en dash used as a subtitle divider, the next detected word is capitalized even when that word is normally an article or preposition. For example, a subtitle beginning with the receives an initial capital because it opens a new title unit.

Opening quotation marks or brackets between the divider and the first word do not interfere with that decision. Hyphenated compounds are processed as connected word elements. The first element follows its position in the overall title, while later elements are capitalized when they are principal words and lowercased when they are articles, coordinating conjunctions, or prepositions.

This turns a phrase such as state-of-the-art into State-of-the-Art: state and art carry meaning, while of and the retain their minor-word forms. The converter also supports letters beyond basic ASCII through Unicode-aware word recognition, and it recognizes straight or curly apostrophes inside a word. It does not silently rewrite punctuation, collapse spaces, invent italics, or create a complete bibliographic citation.

Its single responsibility is capitalization. That narrow scope makes the output predictable for editors and automated pipelines, but human review remains appropriate for unusual coined terms, intentionally lowercase names, acronyms, and brand spellings whose preferred casing cannot be inferred from grammar alone.