See the lists below as guides to using lowercase or uppercase when these words appear in headlines and subheads. CMS 8.59 is recapped below; CMS 8.160 gives examples; CMS 8.161 discusses hyphenated compounds in headline-style titles. The cover of On Wisconsin follows sentence-style capitalization rather than headline style. For headlines in news releases and Inside UW–Madison, capitalize only the first word, proper names, and proper nouns.
Lowercase
- articles (a, an, the)
- prepositions, regardless of length, except when they’re used adverbially or adjectivally, when they’re stressed, or when they make up part of a Latin expression used adverbially or adjectivally: De Facto, In Vitro, etc.
- the coordinating conjunctions for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so
- to and as
- the part of a proper name that would be lowercased in text: de, von
- the second part of a species name, even if it’s the last word
Uppercase
- the first and last words in headlines and subheads, regardless of length
- all other major words: nouns, pronouns, verbs (including Is, Are), adverbs, adjectives
- some conjunctions