Capitalization – Should Apartheid Be Capitalised?

capitalizationproper-nouns

In an attempt to prevent an edit war over on Skeptics.SE, I'll defer to here.

Which is preferred – or are both correct?:

Was South Africa better run during apartheid?

or

Was South Africa better run during Apartheid?

Does apartheid refer to a government system like democracy (common noun) or does Apartheid refer to a specific government (proper noun)?

Best Answer

I would not capitalize "apartheid". None of the dictionaries I have checked capitalize it as a headword (MW, AHD, Collins, Oxford).

Capitalization, like punctuation, is one of the less settled areas of English orthography. I somewhat doubt that there is any definite answer about whether it is "correct" or "incorrect" to capitalize this word, so I won't attempt to answer that part of the question.

The Google Ngram Viewer shows lowercase as more frequent than uppercase:

"apartheid" usually starts with a lowercase letter

This holds also for "during apartheid/Apartheid":

"during apartheid" is usually lowercased

The Oxford English Dictionary does not capitalize it as a headword, and only includes, as far as I can see, one quotation where it is capitalized in a non-sentence-initial position (it is also enclosed in quotation marks in this context):

1949   Manch. Guardian 13 July 4/6   Thus Dr. Malan's policy of ‘Apartheid’ for the non-Europeans, which is only the Dutch word for Field Marshal Smuts's policy of ‘segregation’, which in turn is only a pretty word for repression, is achieving a position of ‘Apartheid’, in the literal sense of isolation, for the nation as a whole.

Compared to this, the OED gives about 10 examples of lowercase apartheid from the late 1940s to the 1960s, which are mostly italicized.

There may be arguments for capitalizing the first letter (at least in some contexts), but the preferred usage seems to be to write "apartheid" with a lowercase letter.

Related Topic