Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're talking about capitalization and the strange phrase, the State of the Union. Have you ever danced with an August partner at an August wedding?

Had to polish a piece of Polish silverware or eaten lima beans in Lima, Peru. Let's talk about

NIMs, words ending in the Greek suffix meaning name, which is usually spelled O-N-Y-M.

You likely learned about three common nims in school, synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms.

But there are many other nims out there.

In past episodes, we've covered homonyms in their cousins homographs and homophones,

acronyms, not to be confused with abbreviations and initialisms, eponyms, contronyms, retronyms, and demonyms.

Well, today we're going to explore one of the more interesting nims, the capitonym,

a word that changes meaning and sometimes pronunciation when it's capitalized.

Now, let's go back to the examples I gave at the beginning. The word august, with a lowercase

a, means inspiring or worthy of respect, while the capitalized form is the eighth month of the year. But they can be pronounced

the same way. An alternate pronunciation for the lowercase form is august. Then lowercase polish

means to rub until shiny, and Polish refers to the country in Eastern Europe. Finally, lowercase

lima is a type of bean, while Lima,

with a capital L, is the capital of Peru. And notice that these last two examples definitely

have different pronunciations. So what's up with that? Well, capitonyms are complex creatures.

Strictly speaking, words like lowercase cancer, the disease,

and capitalized cancer, a constellation and zodiac sign, are homographs, since they're spelled the

same but have different meanings. They're also homophones because they're pronounced the same.

But wait, there's more. More broadly, the two words are also

homonyms, since they're spelled and pronounced the same. It really depends on how you define the terms.

Some like Polish and Polyma and Lima are also heteronyms. They're spelled the same but have different pronunciations.

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