Difference between str.capitalize() and str.title()

Last Updated : 23 Jul, 2025

The primary difference between str.capitalize() and str.title() lies in their scope of capitalization. str.capitalize() only capitalizes the first character of the entire string and str.title() capitalizes the first character of every word in the string. Let's understand both str.capitalize() and str.title() and difference between both in detail:

title() method

title() function in Python is the Python String Method which is used to convert the first character in each word to Uppercase and the remaining characters to Lowercase in the string and returns a new string.

Syntax: str.title()
Returns: This function returns a string which has first letter in each word is uppercase and all remaining letters are lowercase.

Example:

Output

Geeksforgeeks
Gfg
Hello World

capitalize() method

In Python, the capitalize() method converts the first character of the first word of a string to a capital (uppercase) letter.

Syntax: str.capitalize()
Return Type: This function returns a string that has the first letter of the first word in uppercase and all remaining letters of the first word in lowercase.

Example:

Output

Geeks for geeks
GeeksForGeeks

Comparison Between str.capitalize() and str.title()

Criteria	str.capitalize()	str.title()
Function	Capitalizes only the first character of the entire string.	Capitalizes the first character of every word in the string.
Case Conversion	Converts all other characters to lowercase.	Leaves the case of non-initial characters unchanged.
Word Delimiter Handling	Does not consider word boundaries or delimiters.	Treats spaces, hyphens (-), underscores (_) and similar characters as word separators.
Input Impact	Works on the entire string as a single unit.	Processes each word independently.
Special Characters	Does not affect non-alphabetic characters.	Non-alphabetic characters act as delimiters, but remain untouched.
Use Case	Formatting the start of a sentence.	Formatting titles, headings or names.