capitalization
n.the act of writing or printing a word with its first letter as a capital letter. It also refers to the total value of a company's shares on the stock market.
n.the practice of using upper-case letters for the initial character of a word; also, the total market value of a company's outstanding shares. Both senses are typically uncountable in their abstract form but can be countable when referring to specific instances.
“Proper names always require capitalization in English.”
“The editor reminded the writer that consistent capitalization of job titles is necessary throughout the formal report.”
“While the startup's initial capitalization was modest, its rapid growth in user engagement led to a multi-billion dollar valuation within three years of its public offering.”
In the linguistic sense, it refers to the use of upper-case letters. In the financial sense, it often appears in the phrase 'market capitalization'.
Learners often focus on the capital letter but forget the necessary possessive apostrophe in the surrounding noun phrase.
From capitalize + -ation.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.