capitalization

American  

[kap-i-tl-uh-zey-shuhn] / ˌkæp ɪ tl əˈzeɪ ʃən /

noun

1. the act or process of capitalizing.

2. the authorized or outstanding stocks and bonds of a corporation.

3. Accounting.

   1. the total investment of the owner or owners in a business enterprise.

   2. the total corporate liability.

   3. the total arrived at after addition of liabilities.

4. conversion into stocks or bonds.

5. the act of computing the present value of future periodical payments.

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capitalization British  

/ ˌkæpɪtəlaɪˈzeɪʃən /

noun

1. 1. the act of capitalizing

   2. the sum so derived

2. accounting the par value of the total share capital issued by a company, including the loan capital and sometimes reserves

3. the act of estimating the present value of future payments, earnings, etc

4. the act of writing or printing in capital letters

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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

Ziff Davis had a market capitalization of $1.1 billion as of Monday, meaning it shed just one vertical for more than the equity value of its entire company.

From Barron's

That has been a brutal selloff of software stocks that has cost companies like Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow more than one-quarter of their market capitalizations so far this year.

From The Wall Street Journal

The single biggest capability gain in the history of AI was an alignment technique—reinforcement learning from human feedback, the technique that made ChatGPT possible and created trillions of dollars in market capitalization.

From The Wall Street Journal

Investors eager to gain exposure to the AI boom have since sent its shares vaulting more than fourfold from their IPO price, pushing the company’s market capitalization past $30 billion.

From The Wall Street Journal

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

Related Words

• funding