Capitalize first letter of each line

Capitalises the start of every line, or every sentence, without touching the rest.

Four different things people mean by "capitalize", each on its own button. Picking the right one is most of the job.

Which one do you want?

Capitalize each line raises the first letter of every line and leaves everything else exactly as it is. This is the one for lists — menu items, bullet points, product names, a column pasted from a spreadsheet where someone typed in lower case.

Capitalize each sentence follows punctuation instead of line breaks. The first letter after a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark is raised. This is what you want for prose: a paragraph typed without capitals, or dictated text where the speech engine did not punctuate reliably.

Capitalize Each Word raises every word. Useful for names and short labels. This is what most tools mislabel as "title case".

Title Case applies real style-guide rules, where short words stay lower case unless they begin the title. It gives "The Lord of the Rings", not "The Lord Of The Rings". If you are formatting a headline, this is the correct button, and the case converter has the rest of the naming styles.

What is left alone

Only the first letter changes. The rest of the line keeps its existing capitalisation, so acronyms and proper nouns survive: "iPhone sales rose" stays "iPhone sales rose" rather than becoming "IPhone" or "Iphone". Tools that lowercase everything first and then capitalise the start destroy that, and it is a common source of quiet damage in product lists.

Leading whitespace is respected too. An indented line has its first actual letter capitalised, not the space, and the indentation is preserved — which matters for code, Markdown lists and anything where indentation carries meaning.

Lines that start with a number, a bullet or a bracket are handled sensibly: capitalisation applies to the first letter it finds, so "1. hello" becomes "1. Hello" rather than being skipped.

Alphabets other than English

Capitalisation works on any alphabet that has cases — Cyrillic, Greek, accented Latin. Many implementations use a rule that only knows about A to Z and silently skip everything else, so a Russian or Czech list comes back unchanged and it takes a moment to work out why.

Doing it without this tool

Excel: =UPPER(LEFT(A1,1))&MID(A1,2,LEN(A1)) for the first letter of a cell. The related PROPER function capitalises every word and lowercases everything else, which is why it turns "iPhone" into "Iphone" and "USA" into "Usa".

Word: Home → Change Case → Sentence case. It follows punctuation, so it behaves like the sentence button here, and it also lowercases the rest of each sentence, which is not always wanted.

Command line: sed 's/^\(.\)/\U\1/' file.txt with GNU sed.

Google Sheets: =REGEXREPLACE(A1, "^(.)", UPPER("$1")) — which does not work as written, because UPPER is applied to the literal string "$1" rather than to the match. It is one of the most frequently copied broken formulas on the internet.

Try:
0Words
0Characters
0No spaces
0Sentences
0Paragraphs
0Lines
0Pages
0Reading
0Speaking

Runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never uploaded — open DevTools, Network tab, and you will see zero requests while you use this tool.

How to use it

  1. Paste your text into the box.
  2. Press "Capitalize each line" for lists, or "Capitalize each sentence" for prose.
  3. Use "Title Case" for headlines, where short words stay lower case.
  4. Copy the result — the rest of your capitalisation, including acronyms, is untouched.

Related tools

JSON formatterBeautify messy JSON, minify it back to one line, or catch the syntax error —…Case converterSwitch between upper, lower, title, sentence, alternating and inverse case.Remove accentsConverts accented letters to their plain equivalents — é becomes e, not blank.Markdown tablePaste CSV, TSV or spreadsheet cells and get a clean Markdown table.Upside down textFlip a line so it reads the other way up. Copy and paste anywhere.Random numberOne number, or a whole set without repeats, in any range you choose.Meta description lengthWhy 160 characters is a rule of thumb and 920 pixels is the real limit.

See all text tools →

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between capitalizing each line and each sentence?

Each line follows line breaks and is what you want for lists. Each sentence follows full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, and is what you want for paragraphs of prose.

Will it change my acronyms?

No. Only the first letter is touched and the rest of the line keeps its existing capitalisation, so iPhone, USA and NASA survive. the PROPER function in Excel does not behave this way.

Is "Capitalize Each Word" the same as title case?

No, and the difference is why headlines often look wrong. Capitalising each word raises everything. Real title case keeps short words like of, the and and in lower case unless they start the title.

Does it work with Russian, Greek or accented text?

Yes, any alphabet that has upper and lower case is handled. Implementations limited to A-Z silently leave such text unchanged.

What happens to indented lines?

The indentation is kept and the first actual letter is capitalised, so code and Markdown lists are not damaged.