Capital and Capitol are two more words that sound exactly the same but have different spelling and different meaning.
Capital, with the letter a inside, refers to the most important city in a country – the capital city.
Vienna, the capital of Austria, is right along the Danube River.
Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States.
Capital can also mean the upper-case form of a letter of the alphabet.
Always begin your name with a capital letter.
We always use a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence.
Capitol, with the letter o, refers to the government building in a capital city. The federal capitol building in Washington D.C. and most state capitol buildings have a dome at the top. The dome looks like an upside-down bowl on the top of the building. That dome also looks like the letter o in the word capitol.
You can always spot the capitol when driving through Springfield, Illinois, because of the dome on top.
We had a tour of the capitol building when we visited Madison, Wisconsin.
It’s easy to keep the words capital and capitol straight when you remember that capitol has an o like the dome on the top of the building. The other word, capital, means either the main city of a state or country, or the upper-case form of a letter.