With the first day of spring just behind us (at least those of living in the northern hemisphere), I noticed at the time several memes, corporate advertisements, and status updates mentioning spring and the vernal equinox. Many of them capitalized spring.
The thing though is that seasons aren’t capitalized. They aren’t proper nouns and, outside of being used in titles or as the first word in a sentence, they shouldn’t have capital letters.
- It seems so rainy in the spring.
- I love the warmth of summer.
- Today is the first day of autumn.
- It seems so quiet during winter.
In all the above examples, we see that none of the seasons have capital letters. The same goes for phrases using the seasons, such as summer solstice or winter season.
Why don’t we capitalize seasons?
We don’t capitalize the rooms in our home (kitchen, washroom, bedroom, etc) or the items in a park (slide, bench, grass, tree, swings, etc), so why capitalize something as generic as seasons?
Perhaps it has something to do with their relation to time. After all, we capitalize the names of months and the names of days. We capitalize holidays, too.
Except months and days differ from seasons in one particular way: the former are labels for precise time measurements, while seasons aren’t (well, not exactly).
Days of the week, for example, are divided into 7 equal 24-hour periods, and we name each of those 7 periods, just as we name a child or a city or a river. Months, in turn, are collections of 30 days (give or take a day or two), and we name those collections.
Seasons, on the other hand, are less precise. Something we hear in Lethbridge, with its volatile weather, is the usage of multiple season names within one season. During winter, for example, if the weather warms up and the snow starts melting, people might say something like, “Spring is here.” If snow falls after a period of warmer weather, then we might hear, “Winter is back.”
Even if we use a stricter, astronomical definition for the seasons, they depend on the earth’s position to the sun, which isn’t really something humans determine. It’s one thing to artificially create collections of 30 days and name those creations; it’s another to recognize a natural duration between earth’s closet point to the sun, its furthest, and the halfway points between the two.
That’s all a theory though. No one seems to actually know why we don’t capitalize seasons.
Do we ever capitalize seasons?
So, when do we capitalize seasons? Well, like any other noun, there are really only 3 times to capitalize a season:
- When it’s part of a proper noun
- When it’s part of a title
- When it’s the first word in a sentence
Here are some examples:
- Did you watch the Winter Olympics?
- Have you read The Autumn Republic by Brian McClellan?
- I Know What You Did Last Summer is a boring movie.
- Spring gives me a sense of hope and renewal.
In these examples, the seasons are capitalized as part of a proper noun, a title, or the first word of the sentence.
So, remember, seasons don’t need capital letters in most instances. Treat them as any other common noun.
