When to capitalize names in English

Hi, my name is Rebecca, and in today's lesson, we're going to talk about some capitalization

rules. I know it can be quite confusing in English to know which words to capitalize

and which words not to capitalize. I hope this lesson will make it a little easier for

you to understand and remember those rules. Now, there are many different rules about

what to capitalize. In today's lesson, I'm only going to talk about capitalization rules

as they apply to names. All right? There are also capitalization rules that apply to titles

and many other things, and perhaps we'll have a different lesson at some point about those.

In today's lesson, we're just going to talk about the capitalization rules as they apply

to names. So, let's look at what we mean by that. Okay. So, in English, when you mention

the name of a person, when you talk about a person's name, then you need to capitalize

the first letter of that. So, "John Smith", the J and the S are capitalized. Okay? If

you also wrote "Mr. Smith", then the S in "Smith" would be capitalized. All right? So,

the first letter of a person's name, first name, or middle name, or last name, or middle

names, okay, are all capitalized. Next, we are talking about relatives. Now, here, it's

a little bit tricky. If the name that you give to an uncle is "Uncle Peter", and that

is part of his name, okay? It's almost like a title, but it's really almost a part of

his name, then we do capitalize it. Then, we write, "Uncle Peter came to visit us this

weekend." If you just say, "I have an uncle whose name is Peter." In that second example,

we do not capitalize the word "uncle", because here, we're just talking about uncle in general.

It's not part of his name. "I have an uncle whose name is Peter." So, in that sentence,

you will only capitalize "Peter", the P in "Peter", but not the U in "uncle". All right?

Next one, "days". In English, we do capitalize all the days of the week, like here, the M,

Monday. We do capitalize the names of the months of the year, all right? The J in January

and every other month. We also capitalize the names of holidays. So, here we have New

Year's Day. That's the entire name of that holiday. So, we would capitalize the N, and

the Y, and the D, okay?

We also capitalize the names of streets. So, you would capitalize the name of the street

itself, as well as the word, the S in the word "street". So, "King Street", you capitalize

the K and the S. Of course, when I say "streets", there are many words in English for the word

"street". For example, "road", "boulevard", "avenue", or "lane". And each of these, the

first letter would also be capitalized, because it's considered a part of the name of that

street or road, etc., okay?

Names of cities are always capitalized in English, like here, in Madrid. Names of states

are capitalized, as in California, right? And names of countries are always capitalized

in English. For example, "Saudi Arabia", okay? So, even if the name has two words in it,

you would capitalize both of them, the S in "Saudi" and the A in "Arabia". Now, one exception

is if you have a name like "the Philippines". If you have a name like "the Philippines",

then the P in "Philippines" is capitalized, but the is not capitalized, because in that

case, it's not part of the name, okay? If we say "the USA", "the United States of America",

the is not capitalized. The T in "the" is not capitalized, but "united", the U, "states",

the S, "of" is not capitalized, and "America", the A, alright?

When I come back, we're going to look at names of a few other things which we also capitalize,

okay? Okay, so let's continue with some more names that you need to capitalize in English.

We need to capitalize the name of continents, such as "Asia", right? "Africa", so on. The

names of mountains, like "Mount Everest". So, in this case, you see, not only the name

itself, which is "Everest", but also the title "Mount", or the word "Mount", okay? "Mount

Everest". Or, the "Himalayan Mountains". If we said "The Himalayan Mountains", we would

have to capitalize not the word "the", because it's not part of the title, but we would have

to capitalize the H in "Himalayan" and the M in "Mountains", alright?

Names of water, such as "The Atlantic Ocean". Once again, we see the A in "Atlantic", which

is the name, has to be capitalized, but also the O in the word "Ocean". Similarly, for

"Mediterranean Sea", the M and the S. Or, "Lake Ontario", the L and the O. So, things

like that. You have to capitalize both parts. Languages are always capitalized in English,

so when you write the word "English", you need to capitalize the E. If you write the

language name "Vietnamese", you would also capitalize it, alright?

Nationalities are capitalized in English, unlike in French, for example. So, nationalities

- "Brazilian", so we capitalize the B. So, if you write the sentence "I am Brazilian",

you would capitalize the I, because it's the first word in the sentence, and also because

the word "I" is always capitalized. We'll learn about that in another lesson. And the

B in "Brazilian", because it's a nationality.

We also capitalize the names of companies. So, for example, "Nokia", we would capitalize

the N, the first letter. Also, when we talk about brand names, "brand" is the product

that the company produces, right? For example, "Coca-Cola" or "Pepsi". So, in "Pepsi", we

would capitalize the P. Now, generally, the brand names, the first name, the first letter

in the name is capitalized. There are always exceptions. For example, a popular exception

is the "iPhone", and the I here, even though it's the first letter, is not actually capitalized.

The P is capitalized. Why is that? Well, they just want it to be different, right? So, that's

an exception, really. But generally speaking, we would capitalize the first letter of a

brand name, alright?

So, these are some capitalization rules. I know there are many of them. Try to practice

them as much as you can. And if you'd like to do a quiz on this, please visit our website

at www.engvid.com. You'll find a quiz on this, as well as many other videos and quizzes which

you can do to improve your English. Thanks very much for watching. Bye for now.