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What does this converter do?
Title case converter: format any text into APA, Chicago, AP, or MLA title case with correct rules for small words. Free, private, runs in your browser.
- Style guides disagree on which words stay lowercase (short prepositions, articles, conjunctions) — the tool applies your chosen convention consistently.
When this tool earns its keep
Use it when you need converting headings to AP, Chicago, APA, or title-case conventions — and you need it repeatedly or once, with the result ready to copy. Pair it with its related tools below when the output feeds the next step.
How this calculator works
Formula
Capitalises each word except a fixed small-word set (a, an, and, as, at, but, by, for, in, of, on, or, the, to, via, with, vs) when it sits between the first and last word.
Site methodology
This page does not cite an external source yet. The link above documents how we build and check calculators; it is our own process, not third-party validation. Treat the inputs and results as editable estimates.
Assumptions to verify
- Input format is assumed clean; malformed input is reported rather than guessed at.
- Output is computed client-side and stays in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
Is anything sent to a server?
No. The transform runs in your browser; nothing you paste leaves the page.
What is the honest limitation?
It is mechanical, not judgmental: the tool guarantees format correctness, not fitness for your context — skim the output before shipping it.
Cite this tool
BoringToolsKit. “Title Case Converter.” boringtoolskit.com/title-case-converter/ (reviewed 2026-09-20). Free to reference in articles, syllabi, and answer posts with a link.
Privacy: Inputs and results stay in this browser. Conversion runs locally in your browser; review the output before relying on it.
A worked example, word by word
Take the input: a guide to the art of bread baking. The converter splits it on whitespace into 8 tokens, then walks the list once. Token 1 is a, a small word, but the rule keeps small words lowercase only when they sit between the first and last positions, never at position 1 of 8, so it becomes A. Token 2 is guide: not on the small list, so its first character is uppercased to Guide. Token 3 is to, small and mid-list, so it stays to.
Tokens 4 through 8 run the same two tests. The at position 4 is small and not first or last, so it stays lowercase. Art, bread, and baking fail the small-word test (only 17 words are on that list: a, an, and, as, at, but, by, for, in, of, on, or, the, to, via, with, vs), so each gets its initial capitalized. Token 8, baking, is the last word, and even if it were a small word the final-position rule would capitalize it anyway. The output is A Guide to the Art of Bread Baking: 5 of 8 words changed case, 3 deliberately left alone, 0 dropped.
Character count does not change here, and generally cannot shrink: the input is 34 characters, the output is 34, because capitalization replaces a letter rather than inserting one. Every title this tool produces has exactly the same character count as its input, which is a quick sanity check you can run by eye on any result.
Boundary cases the small-word rule runs into
The small-word set is fixed at 17 entries and the rule is purely positional, which produces three boundaries worth knowing. At the minimum, a one-word input like bread always capitalizes, because a single word is both first and last. At the other extreme, a mostly-small input like the cat in the hat on the mat still capitalizes 4 of its 7 words (the, cat, hat, mat) since first and last positions are exempt.
Three-word inputs expose the tightest boundary. Alice in wonderland becomes Alice in Wonderland with in still lowercase, because in sits at position 2 of 3, squarely inside the exempt-free middle. Same for cat and dog: Cat and Dog, with and untouched at position 2 of 3. In any title of 3 words, at most 1 word can stay lowercase, and only if it is on the 17-word list; at 2 words, none can.
Two real-world wrinkles remain. Tokens split on whitespace, so hyphenated words count as one token and only the first letter is touched: sugar-free becomes Sugar-free, not Sugar-Free. Punctuation is preserved as a tail after the last letter, digit, apostrophe, or hyphen, so don't comes back as Don't with the apostrophe intact. Anything off the list is capitalized unconditionally, so HTML returns as Html, which is wrong for that case and worth a manual fix after pasting.