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Capitalization

General use:

Follow the standard capitalization rules for American English. Additionally, do the following:

  • Don't use unnecessary capitalization; before you capitalize a word, think about why (and whether) it should be capitalized.
  • Don't rely on a difference in capitalization to convey meaning. For example, although people who are familiar with Kubernetes probably understand that a capitalized Pod is a Kubernetes unit, and a lowercase pod is any other kind of pod, that distinction is likely lost on many casual readers or those who are new to the domain.
  • Don't use all-uppercase, except in the following contexts: in official names, in abbreviations that are always written in all-caps, or when referring to code that uses all-caps.

Capitalize product names

For information about how to capitalize product names, see Product names.

Capitalization in titles and headings

In document titles and headings, use sentence case. That is, capitalize only the first word in the title, the first word in a subheading after a colon, and any proper nouns or other terms that are always capitalized a certain way.

Even though you're using sentence case, don't put a period at the end of a title or heading.

Capitalization in references to titles and headings

In references to any title or heading from a document that follows this guide, use sentence case even if the title or heading itself uses title case. That way, when the title or heading is eventually updated to sentence case, the reference will match.

Capitalization and figures

Use sentence case for captions. Use sentence case for labels, callouts, and other text in images and diagrams.

Capitalization in glossaries and indexes

Use lowercase for glossary and index terms unless the term is a proper noun or has another reason to require capitalization.

Use sentence case for glossary definitions.

Capitalization and hyphenated words

When a hyphenated word is the first word in a sentence or in a heading, capitalize only the first element in the word, unless a subsequent element is a proper noun or proper adjective.