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
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
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
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.