In general, when a direction is a description, it's lowercase, and when it's the name of something, it's capitalized—but there are exceptions. Sometimes directional terms such as south are capitalized and sometimes they aren't.

Are the four directions capitalized?

At the most basic level, the standard advice is to lowercase north, south, east and west when used as compass directions and to capitalize them when they are used as part of a proper noun or adjective or refer to regions or geographic areas.

Should you Capitalise north south east west?

MLA style follows The Chicago Manual of Style (8.47) for geographic terms. For example, we capitalize north, south, east, and west when the terms refer to regions or cultures: Customs in the East differ from those in the West. She moved from the East Coast to the West Coast.