Is On Capitalized in a Title?

At first glance, capitalizing on in title case seems easy: On a preposition, so it must be lowercased, right? Well, it’s not quite that simple, because on is not always a preposition, it can also be used as an adverb or an adjective, and in those cases it must be capitalized. Let’s take a closer look at the different cases.

On is often used as an adverb, especially in phrasal verbs such as “bring on,” “carry on,” “move on,” or “take on,” and it must be capitalized in this usage. Here are some examples:

When used as an adjective, on is capitalized as well:

However, when on is used as a preposition, it is lowercased:

Under certain circumstances, the preposition on is capitalized after all. All style guides agree that the first word in a title is always capitalized:

However, there’s no consensus on how to handle the last word. According to AP, Chicago, MLA, New York Times, and Wikipedia style, the last word is also always capitalized:

Such a rule does not exist though in AMA, APA, and Bluebook style, so in these styles, a minor word is not capitalized when it is the last word:

Capitalizing on in hyphenated words can be tricky, at least if you follow AMA style, whose rules produce unintuitive results (in my opinion). When on is the second word in a two-word compound like “head-on” or “add-on,” then it is sometimes capitalized in AMA style and sometimes not. For example, it’s

but

In all other styles, on is capitalized in both cases. For more information, see the article Capitalizing Hyphenated Words in Titles.

A Tip