Capital vs Capitol

I’m a bit late for a midweek post but hopefully you’ll excuse me as I’m on a family holiday. This post will hopefully clear up the confusion over these two very similar words.

These words are often mixed up. People find themselves writing capitol when the word they are really looking for is capital. An easy mistake to make, especially given that there is only one letter that is different.

So what’s the deal with these two words?

Capital is a word with many uses.

It refers to the most important city in a country or region, usually where government is situated.

London is the capital of England.

It also describes upper case letters.

Each sentence should start with a capital letter.

In addition, capital refers to “anything that can be used for productive purposes by a firm or individual.” (investopedia)

Our firm lacks the financial capital to go forward in the current climate.

Finally, it is used to describe a crime that is punished by death.

Murder is a capital offence.

Capitol refers to a building which houses a government’s legislative branch. This is where laws are passed. There are several of these, found primarily in the United States and the main Capitol building is situated in Washington, on Capitol Hill. Notice that when you write about the Washington building, Capitol needs an upper case c. You only use the word capitol when referring to one of these buildings. (If you are not referring to a capitol building, you use capital.)

The famous Capitol building in Washington has a dome.

You can think of this dome when remembering the spelling of capitol. You can remember the capitol referring to the building is spelt with an o like the dome it has on the roof. (The site vocabulary.com can be credited for this handy tip.)

I hope this clears things up for you. The idea for this blog post came from a comment from a reader so do feel free to suggest more word confusions you’d like cleared up.