capitalization
Americannoun
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the act or process of capitalizing.
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the authorized or outstanding stocks and bonds of a corporation.
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Accounting.
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the total investment of the owner or owners in a business enterprise.
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the total corporate liability.
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the total arrived at after addition of liabilities.
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conversion into stocks or bonds.
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the act of computing the present value of future periodical payments.
noun
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the act of capitalizing
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the sum so derived
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accounting the par value of the total share capital issued by a company, including the loan capital and sometimes reserves
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the act of estimating the present value of future payments, earnings, etc
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the act of writing or printing in capital letters
Usage
What does capitalization mean? Capitalization is the act of using capital letters.A capital letter (A, B, C, etc.) is a letter of the alphabet that is bigger than the lower case version (e.g., c, o, s) and sometimes styled differently as well (e.g., a, b, q). In English, we use capital letters for several reasons.The most common reasons we use capitalization in English are to begin a sentence and to indicate a proper noun.We capitalize the first letter of the first word of a sentence to show that this is the beginning of the sentence, as in Who took my wallet?This includes complete sentences that are used in quotations, as in Mom said, “We are going to the mall.”We also use capitalization for proper nouns, that is a particular person, place, or thing, like James, New York, or the Library of Congress.Sometimes, though, companies name themselves or their products without any capitalization or with capitalization in the middle of the word (sometimes called camel case), as in adidas, eBay, and WikiAnswers.The pronoun I is always capitalized, no matter where it is used in a sentence, as in He went to the park, but I stayed home.
Etymology
Origin of capitalization
First recorded in 1855–60; capitalize + -ation
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
On Monday, software stocks lost over $200 billion in market capitalization after Citrini Research released a blog post depicting a hypothetical future where AI leads to mass layoffs.
From MarketWatch
The plain old S&P 500 represents those companies in proportion to their market capitalization.
The index tracked by this fund is rebalanced twice a year and weighted by the product of each stock’s quality score and market capitalization.
From MarketWatch
All together, components of the State Street software ETF have lost a combined $1.6 trillion in market capitalization this year.
Its market capitalization fell to roughly $11 billion that year from around $22 billion in 2012 after losing ground to accessible luxury competitors like Michael Kors and relying heavily on discounting.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
