Editing Capitalization (section)

{{Short description|Using uppercase for a word's first letter}}
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[[File:Latin alphabet Aa.svg|right|thumb|The capital letter "A" in the Latin alphabet, followed by its lowercase equivalent, in [[sans serif]] and [[serif]] [[typeface]]s respectively]]

'''Capitalization''' ([[North American English|North American spelling]]; also [[Oxford spelling|British spelling in Oxford]]) or '''capitalisation''' ([[English in the Commonwealth of Nations|Commonwealth English]]; all other meanings) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a [[Letter case|case distinction]]. The term also may refer to the choice of the casing applied to text.

Conventional writing systems ([[orthography|orthographies]]) for different languages have different conventions for capitalization, for example, the capitalization of titles. Conventions also vary, to a lesser extent, between different [[style guide]]s. In addition to the [[Latin script]], capitalization also affects the [[Armenian alphabet|Armenian]], [[Cyrillic alphabet|Cyrillic]], [[Georgian alphabet|Georgian]] and [[Greek alphabet|Greek]] [[alphabet]]s.

The full rules of [[capitalization in English]] are complicated. The rules have also changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer words. The conventions used in an 18th-century document will be unfamiliar to a modern reader; for instance, many common nouns were capitalized.

The systematic use of capitalized and uncapitalized words in running text is called "mixed case".