The United States Capitol Building, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. A common typo, particularly among Americans, comes from confusing capital and capitol.  It’s an easy mistake to make, since both words mean something similar, and both are pronounced exactly the same.  But there’s a crucial difference, and one that means more in America than it does in other English-speaking countries. The word capital is an indirect descendant of the Latin word caput, which means head.  Its descent from Latin is indirect because it came to English, like so many words, from French.  Capitale was an Old French word that entered English sometime around the 13th century.  Its original meaning was “pertaining to the head”.  By the 15th century, the word had taken on the meaning “of chief importance”, and by the 18th century it came to mean “first rate” or “excellent”.  Around the early 16th century, the term capital crime came into use, meaning basically what it mea...