Capitalization in Titles and Multi-Word Names

When you write the title of a book, film, song, or article in English, you capitalize almost every word: The Lord of the Rings, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment. Czech does the exact opposite. Czech titles use sentence case: you capitalize only the first word and any proper noun inside the title — everything else stays lowercase. This single difference trips up nearly every English speaker, because the instinct to "title-case" is deeply ingrained. This page covers titles, institution names, and the multi-word place names that follow their own logic.

The core rule: capitalize the first word and proper nouns only

A Czech title is written as if it were the opening of a sentence: first word capital, the rest lowercase unless a word is independently a proper noun (a person, a place, a brand). Compare:

In Sto roků samoty, only Sto is capitalized; roků and samoty are ordinary nouns and stay lowercase. In Zločin a trest, only Zločin is capital — trest (punishment) is lowercase even though English would capitalize "Punishment."

The principle behind this is consistent and easy to state: in Czech, a capital letter signals that a word is itself a proper name — it points to one specific, named entity. A capital is a property of the word, not a decoration applied to titles. English uses capitals for two unrelated jobs — marking proper nouns and dressing up titles, headings, and headlines — so English speakers learn to read "many capitals" as a visual cue for "this is a title." Czech keeps only the first job. A title gets exactly the capitals its words would have in a plain sentence, plus one for the opening word, because every sentence-like unit starts with a capital. Nothing more.

When a proper noun sits inside the title, it keeps its capital

The rule has one built-in exception: a word that is a proper noun in its own right — a person's name, a place — keeps the capital it would always have, wherever it appears in the title.

• Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka — only Osudy (first word) and Švejka (a character's name) are capitalized; dobrého and vojáka are lowercase.
• Tři oříšky pro Popelku — Tři (first word) and Popelku (Cinderella, a name) are capital; oříšky and pro are lowercase.
• Babička and Saturnin are single-word titles, so the one word is naturally capitalized.

Institutions follow the same rule — but laws do not

Names of organizations, ministries, and offices are written in sentence case — first word capital, the rest lowercase unless a proper noun appears:

• Ministerstvo školství — Ministry of Education (only Ministerstvo capital).
• Český statistický úřad — the Czech Statistical Office (Český is capital because it derives from Česko/Čech, a proper noun).

Laws are the exception: their everyday names are written entirely lowercase, even the first word, because they are descriptive labels rather than registered proper names (the truly official designation is the law's number). So it is občanský zákoník (the Civil Code), zákoník práce (the Labour Code), trestní zákoník (the Criminal Code) — all lowercase in a running sentence. This is the one place where the "first word gets a capital" expectation fails: a law name only takes a capital when it actually starts the sentence.

Be careful with a common point of confusion here: the adjective český "Czech" is lowercase when it just describes something (český film "a Czech film", české pivo "Czech beer"), but it is capitalized when it is part of an official proper name (Česká republika "the Czech Republic", Český rozhlas "Czech Radio"). The word itself doesn't change; what changes is whether it belongs to a fixed proper name or is doing ordinary descriptive work. This is the same logic as everywhere else on this page — a capital marks membership in a name.

The place-name exception: each free element keeps its capital

Multi-word geographic names work differently. Here, every free-standing proper element is capitalized, while generic connectors and prepositions stay lowercase:

• Nové Město na Moravě — both Nové and Město are capital (they form the proper name together), na is a lowercase preposition, and Moravě is a place, so capital.
• Hradec Králové — both words capital (a fixed two-part place name).
• Karlovy Vary — both words capital.

Streets and squares: capitalize the specific part, lowercase the generic word

Within street and square names, the defining element is capitalized but the generic noun (ulice "street", náměstí "square", třída "avenue") is lowercase — unless that generic word happens to come first.

• Václavské náměstí — Václavské capital (the specific adjective), náměstí lowercase.
• Karlova ulice — Karlova capital, ulice lowercase.
• But Náměstí Míru — here Náměstí is the first word, so it is capitalized, and Míru (peace, but treated as the defining element of the name) is also capital.

Universities: word order changes the capitals

A neat illustration of the generic-word rule: Univerzita Karlova (Charles University). In its official form the generic word Univerzita comes first and is capitalized; Karlova (the adjective from Karel) is also capital because it's the defining element derived from a name. In the common reversed order Karlova univerzita, Karlova leads and is capital, and univerzita is now the trailing generic word, so it drops to lowercase.

A note on punctuation around titles

Czech does not need quotation marks or italics to mark a title the way English habitually does, though both are used in print for clarity. What it will not do is rescue an English-style title by adding capitals. If you are translating an English work into Czech and keeping the original title, you keep the English capitalization (The Lord of the Rings stays as it is, because it is a foreign string). But the moment you give the Czech title, you switch fully to Czech rules: Pán prstenů, one capital. Mixing the two — writing a Czech title with English-style capitals — is the single most common giveaway of a non-native writer, and it looks to a Czech reader roughly the way "the lord of the rings" with no capitals at all looks to an English reader: visibly wrong.

When a Czech title appears mid-sentence, it also declines like any other noun phrase, and the capitalization travels unchanged through the cases: nominative Pán prstenů, accusative Pána prstenů, genitive Pána prstenů. Only the endings move; the capital stays on the first word.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Czech titles use sentence case: capitalize the first word and any proper noun, nothing else.
• Common nouns inside a title stay lowercase, even where English would capitalize them (Zločin a trest, Sto roků samoty).
• A name or place inside a title keeps its capital (...vojáka Švejka, ...pro Popelku).
• Institutions follow the same first-word rule (Ministerstvo školství); law names, though, are written all-lowercase (občanský zákoník) unless they open a sentence.
• Place names capitalize every free proper element (Nové Město na Moravě); prepositions stay lowercase.
• In streets/squares, capitalize the specific element and lowercase the generic word (Václavské náměstí) unless it comes first (Náměstí Míru).