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Should each word be capitalized in this greeting To whom it may concern?
No. Greetings are not capitalized. They're pretty much like a sentence or part of the document itself, not like a title. It's just written as "To whom it may concern:"

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I performed an advanced search on Google, and typed in "to whom it may concern" along with the words "capital," "capitalize" and "capitalization." It returned 74,600 hits.

A quick review of the first 200 hits indicated that one should either: (1) Capitalize all words; (2) Capitalize only the first word; (3) Capitalize every letter in every word; (4) Do not capitalize any of the words; (5) Capitalize the word "To" and follow it with a colon, and then either (a) capitalize or (b) do not capitalize the other words; (6) Capitalize "To" and "Whom" only; (7) Capitalize "To" and "May" only; Capitalize "To" "Whom" and "Concern" only; or (8) Capitalize every word except "it." Of course, I might have missed a variation or two.

I recall being taught in elementary school, over half a century ago, to treat the salutation like a title. That being the case, the rule for capitalizing titles is: Capitalize the first word and every word except conjunctions, articles and short prepositions. But I seem to remember being taught not to capitalize pronouns in a title either.

The bottom line seems to be that no matter which form you choose, someone will think it is incorrect. My suggestion is to capitalize "To" only, but from the variety of choices I've seen, you can do pretty much as you please.

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First answer by Nite Owl. Last edit by Auldepharte69. Contributor trust: 128 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 1 [recommend question].

Answers.com > Wiki Answers > Categories > Literature and Language > English Language > Grammar > Punctuation and Capitalization > Should each word be capitalized in this greeting To whom it may concern?

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