Capitalizing Headlines and Titles in English?

Written October 26. 2006, at 22:32 GMT.

I've always been uncertain what the exact rules are for deciding which words to capitalize in titles in English.

According to Wikipedia there are no hard-set rules on the matter, but judging by a number of English grammar and style guides I found online, the most common "official" rule seems to be this:

"Always capitalize the first and last word in a title. Capitalize all the other words except for a, an, the, and conjunctions and prepositions of four letters or fewer."

Another one says similar things:

"The first, last, and important words in a title. The concept "important words" usually does not include articles, short prepositions (which means you might want to capitalize "towards" or "between," say), the "to" of an infinitive, and coordinating conjunctions."

Both of these are actually pretty close to the set of rules I'd "reverse-engineered" by looking at loads of titles on websites and in paper publications, and by applying my personal sense of "title-aesthetics" to the mix.

More like this: English Entries, .