Find capitalised words — names, places and brands — in any text

How to use the capitalized word extractor

1. Paste your text into Your text.
2. Keep Skip words that are capitalised only because they start a sentence ticked for a cleaner list of proper nouns.
3. Keep Skip the pronoun I ticked so “I” is not counted.
4. Read Distinct words and Occurrences, then use the Capitalised words table (with counts) or the plain List.

What it does and when to use it

In English, capital letters mark proper nouns: people, places, companies, products, days, months and acronyms. Pulling out the capitalised words is a quick way to see who and what a text is about.

Practical uses:

• Editing and fact-checking. List every name and place in an article so you can check spellings, for example Lufthansa versus Luftansa.
• Translation and localisation. Collect the names and brand terms that should not be translated.
• Indexes and glossaries. Get a first list of candidate terms from a report or a book chapter.

For words of any case, ranked by use, try word frequency or unique words. To turn the names you find into initials, use the initials extractor. To hide some of them before sharing, the word censor can mask them.

How it works

The tool scans for words that begin with an uppercase letter from any alphabet and are not joined to a letter, digit or apostrophe before them. A word may contain letters, digits, apostrophes and hyphens. A final ’s and any trailing apostrophe or hyphen are removed.

With the sentence-start option on, the tool looks backwards from each word, past spaces, quotes and opening brackets. If it reaches the start of the text, a line break, or one of . ! ? … :, the word is treated as a sentence starter and skipped. The remaining words are counted and sorted by count, highest first, and then from A to Z. It all runs in your browser.

Worked examples

These outputs come from the tool’s own function.

A travel note. “Last May, Priya flew from Mumbai to Berlin with Lufthansa. In Berlin she met Tom at the Brandenburg Gate. They talked about NASA.” gives Distinct words: 9 and 10 occurrences. The table starts with Berlin | 2, followed by Brandenburg, Gate, Lufthansa, May, Mumbai, NASA, Priya and Tom once each. “Last”, “In” and “They” were skipped as sentence starters.

Including sentence starters. “The Big Apple is New York.” with the option unticked lists Apple, Big, New, The | 1 and York.

Pronoun and possessive. “I think Maria’s car is at O’Hare, and I know it.” gives Maria and O'Hare. Both uses of I were skipped.

Limits and tips

• A name that only ever appears at the start of a sentence will be missed while sentence starters are skipped.
• Ordinary words after a colon in the middle of a line are treated as sentence starters too.