When to Capitalize ‘Mom’ and Other Nicknames and Terms of Endearment

When “mom” is descriptive, it’s lowercase. When it’s used in place of a name, like a nickname, it’s capitalized.

Scribes writing with the early Roman alphabet didn’t have to choose between uppercase and lowercase letters because there were no lowercase letters—all the letters were what we think of today as capitals. Lowercase letters came much later, as did the names “uppercase” and “lowercase.”

Uppercase and Lowercase

In 1382, the Wycliffe Bible was the first written reference to mention “capital” letters, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The terms “uppercase” and “lowercase” came later and reflected the way compositors arranged the boxes that held the individual letters used in printing. The larger letters were literally stored in an upper case, and the smaller letters were stored in a lower case (along with the type for punctuation and spaces).

Printers Helped Determine Capitalization Rules

In addition to giving us the names “uppercase” and “lowercase,” printers also played a role in standardizing English capitalization. When compositors were turning handwritten manuscripts into printed documents, they often faced indecipherable handwriting, so they simply made their own decisions about which words should be capitalized. These early printers started the practice of capitalizing all nouns in English—a trend that has since fallen away but that was prominent in the 18th century. In fact, the US Constitution, written in 1787, not only codifies the birth of our nation but also serves as an easily accessible example of capitalized common nouns.

Capitalization Wasn’t Always Like It Is Today

Capitalization styles shifted so much and so quickly that by the 1830s, writers were favoring lowercase letters, not only for common nouns but also for many things we would capitalize today. The reasons for the change are mysterious. The prominent usage writer H.L. Mencken speculated that the change was “probably as a result of French influence.” During this time, writers sometimes kept days of the week and courtesy titles lowercase. For example, they may have written about meeting “mr. Mencken on wednesday.” 

And then I found snippet in a later book from 1894 called the “Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking,” in which the author, Wesley Washington Pasco, bemoaned that librarians had become “wearied with the difficulty of applying an exact rule to every case,” And were insisting that the only words that should be capitalized were words at the beginning of sentences and words that were “strictly proper nouns.”

These were times of great change. Today, of course, we capitalize “Mr.” and “Wednesday” and keep words such as “power,” “age,” and “years” lowercase (all three of which are capitalized in the Constitution).

Current Basic Capitalization Rules

The most basic modern capitalization rule is to capitalize proper nouns and keep common nouns lowercase. A proper noun is the name of a person or thing, whereas a common noun is a generic descriptor. Therefore, we write about the Golden Gate Bridge (with “bridge” capitalized) and the orange bridge that crosses the bay (with “bridge” lowercase).

Names, Nicknames, and Terms of Endearment

It quickly gets complicated though. For example, we know that we capitalize someone’s name (for example, Juliette), but what about a nickname? Nicknames are capitalized, so if you always call Juliette “Northie” because she’s from Alaska, you’d capitalize “Northie” the same way you’d capitalize “Juliette.”

• Hey, Juliette, do you want to go to the movies tonight?
• Hey, Northie, do you want to go to the movies tonight?

On the other hand, you may call your husband “honey,” but you don’t capitalize “honey” the same way you’d capitalize a nickname. It’s considered a term of endearment, and those aren’t capitalized. The difference can be subtle. One trick for telling the difference between a nickname and a term of endearment is to test whether you’d use the term when talking to someone else. If you were talking to your visiting sister about your husband, would you say, “Honey called and said he’ll pick up dinner on the way home”? If not, “honey” is a term of endearment and you don’t capitalize it. (I have met people who are called “Honey” as a nickname, so it’s not a universal rule that you don’t capitalize “honey.”)

When to Capitalize ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’

“Mom” and “dad” are similarly tricky. When they are descriptive, they are lowercase. When they are used in place of a name, like a nickname, they are capitalized.

In “I told my mom you are coming over after school,” “mom” is lowercase. But in, “Will you check on Mom next week?” “mom” is capitalized.

One quick way to determine whether you should capitalize “mom” or “mother” is to note whether you have a pronoun in front of the word because the pronoun is a clue that you’re dealing with a descriptive term, not a replacement for someone’s name. For example, “mom” is lowercase if you’re saying,

• Have you seen my mom lately?
• His mom always makes me feel welcome
• Judy went to visit her mom.

We don’t usually put pronouns in front of proper nouns. For example, if your mom’s name is Shirley, you wouldn’t say, “Have you seen my Shirley lately?”

If you’re using “mom” the same way you’d use a name such as “Shirley,” then you capitalize “mom”:

• Shirley is coming over for dinner tonight.
• Mom is coming over for dinner tonight.

(Note: “Mom” would always be capitalized in the previous example because it is at the beginning of a sentence, but it would be capitalized if it weren’t at the beginning too. For example, it would be capitalized if the sentence were “Tell your brother Mom is coming over for dinner tonight.”)

Like pronouns, if there’s an article such as “the” in front of the words “mom” or “mother,” you don’t usually capitalize the word. For example, if you’re describing a scene in a play and write, “The mom enters the stage from the left,” “mom” is lowercase because it’s just a common noun. It would be the same as saying, “The boy enters the stage from the left.”

Mother’s Day

Finally, the official name of the holiday this Sunday is “Mother’s Day”—Mother-apostrophe-s. The founder, Anna Jarvis, intentionally made the name singular because she wanted people to honor their own mother. She did not intend it to be a day of celebrating motherhood in generally, and eventually she came to despise the commercialization of her invention so much that she tried to get the day abolished—to no avail.

Nevertheless, happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there. May your children always love you and know when to use apostrophes.

A version of this article originally appear in “Office Pro Magazine.”

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Mignon Fogarty is Grammar Girl and the founder of Quick and Dirty Tips. Check out her New York Times best-seller, “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.”