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Possible Duplicates:
How Should Trademarks be Written?
How do you capitalize a proper noun such as “iPhone”?

Many products these days have names that intentionally begin with lowercase letters. The most common examples are of the Apple "iDevice" variety, but there are some others - inSSIDer is one.

When beginning a sentence with these names, should the name be capitalized?

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    Even more probable duplicate of How do you capitalize a proper noun such as "iPhone"?
    – Kosmonaut
    Commented Mar 11, 2011 at 23:28
  • I agree that this will (d)evolve into a duplicate of How Should Trademarks be Written?
    – HaL
    Commented Mar 11, 2011 at 23:32
  • I'm sorry. The suggested exact duplicate didn't pop up when I wrote the title for this thread.
    – Iszi
    Commented Mar 12, 2011 at 0:30
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    Looking for what reported when writing the title doesn't help much; the only way to verify if the question has been already asked is to search using the search field on this site, or to search with Google, writing "site:english.stackexchange.com " at the beginning of the search string (to notice the space after ".com").
    – avpaderno
    Commented Mar 12, 2011 at 0:53

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Even if a company considers non-standard formatting of a trademark "official", style guides usually suggest that the formatting be ignored. But, trademarks beginning with a one-letter lowercase prefix pronounced as a separate letter do not need to be capitalized if the second letter is capitalized. Ultimately, the Wikipedia Manual of Style suggests rephrasing to avoid beginning sentences with such trademarks.

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  • Brilliant. That paragraph should look pretty familiar then. :)
    – HaL
    Commented Mar 12, 2011 at 1:56

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